magisterial reform, at the expense of various established
and superannuated pickers and stealers, who had been his
neighbours for half a century. He wrought his miracles like a
second Duke Humphrey; and by the influence of the beadle’s rod,
caused the lame to walk, the blind to see, and the palsied to
labour. He detected poachers, black-fishers, orchard-breakers,
and pigeon-shooters; had the applause of the bench for his
reward, and the public credit of an active magistrate.
‘All this good had its rateable proportion of evil. Even an
admitted nuisance, of ancient standing, should not be abated
without some caution. The zeal of our worthy friend now
involved in great distress sundry personages whose idle and
mendicant habits his own _lâchesse_ had contributed to foster,
until these habits had become irreclaimable, or whose real
incapacity for exertion rendered them fit objects, in their
own phrase, for the charity of all well-disposed Christians.
The “long-remembered beggar,” who for twenty years had made
his regular rounds within the neighbourhood, received rather
as an humble friend than as an object of charity, was sent to
the neighbouring workhouse. The decrepit dame, who travelled
round the parish upon a hand-barrow, circulating from house
to house like a bad shilling, which every one is in haste to
pass to his neighbour; she who used to call for her bearers as
loud, or louder, than a traveller demands post-horses, even she
shared the same disastrous fate. The “daft Jock,” who, half
knave, half idiot, had been the sport of each succeeding race
of village children for a good part of a century, was remitted
to the county bridewell, where, secluded from free air and
sunshine, the only advantages he was capable of enjoying, he
pined and died in the course of six months. The old sailor, who
had so long rejoiced the smoky rafters of every kitchen in the
country, by singing _Captain Ward_ and _Bold Admiral Benbow_,
was banished from the county for no better reason than that
he was supposed to speak with a strong Irish accent. Even the
annual rounds of the pedlar were abolished by the Justice, in
his hasty zeal for the administration of rural police.
‘These things did not pass without notice and censure. We
are not made of wood or stone, and the things which connect
themselves with our hearts and habits cannot, like bark or
lichen, be rent away without our missing them. The farmer’s
dame lacked her usual share of intelligence, perhaps also
the self-applause which she had felt while distributing the
_awmous_ (alms), in shape of a _gowpen_ (handful) of oatmeal,
to the mendicant who brought the news. The cottage felt
inconvenience from interruption of the petty trade carried on
by the itinerant dealers. The children lacked their supply of
sugar-plums and toys; the young women wanted pins, ribbons,
combs, and ballads; and the old could no longer barter their
eggs for salt, snuff, and tobacco. All these circumstances
brought the busy Laird of Ellangowan into discredit, which was
the more general on account of his former popularity. Even his
lineage was brought up in judgment against him. They thought
“naething of what the like of Greenside, or Burnville, or
Viewforth, might do, that were strangers in the country; but
Ellangowan! that had been a name amang them since the mirk
Monanday, and lang before—_him_ to be grinding the puir at
that rate!—They ca’d his grandfather the Wicked Laird; but,
though he was whiles fractious aneuch, when he got into roving
company, and had ta’en the drap drink, he would have scorned to
gang on at this gate. Na, na, the muckle chumlay in the Auld
Place reeked like a killogie in his time, and there were as
mony puir folk riving at the banes in the court and about the
door, as there were gentles in the ha’. And the leddy, on ilka
Christmas night as it came round, gae twelve siller pennies to
ilka puir body about, in honour of the twelve apostles like.
They were fond to ca’ it papistrie; but I think our great folk
might take a lesson frae the papists whiles. They gie another
sort o’ help to puir folk than just dinging down a saxpence
in the brod on the Sabbath, and kilting, and scourging, and
drumming them a’ the sax days o’ the week besides.”’
Many other indications of the same healthy and natural sense, which
gives so much of their characteristic charm to the Scotch novels, might
be pointed out, if it were necessary to weary our readers by dwelling
longer on a point we have already laboured so much. One more, however,
demands notice because of its importance, and perhaps also because,
from its somewhat less obvious character, it might otherwise escape
without notice. There has been frequent controversy as to the penal
code, if we may so call it, of fiction; that is, as to the apportionment
of reward and punishment respectively to the good and evil personages
therein delineated; and the practice of authors has been as various
as the legislation of critics. One school abandons all thought on the
matter, and declares that in the real life we see around us, good people
often fail, and wicked people continually prosper; and would deduce the
precept, that it is unwise in an art which should hold the ‘mirror up
to nature,’ not to copy the uncertain and irregular distribution of
its sanctions. Another school, with an exactness which savours at times
of pedantry, apportions the success and the failure, the pain and the
pleasure of fictitious life to the moral qualities of those who are
living in it—does not think at all, or but little, of any other quality
in those characters, and does not at all care whether the penalty and
reward are evolved in natural sequence from the circumstances and
characters of the tale, or are owing to some monstrous accident far
removed from all relation of cause or consequence to those facts and
people. Both these classes of writers produce works which jar on the
natural sense of common readers, and are at issue with the analytic
criticism of the best critics. One school leaves an impression of an
uncared-for world, in which there is no right and no wrong; the other,
of a sort of Governesses’ Institution of a world, where all praise and
all blame, all good and all pain, are made to turn on special graces
and petty offences, pesteringly spoken of and teasingly watched for.
The manner of Scott is thoroughly different; you can scarcely lay down
any novel of his without a strong feeling that the world in which the
fiction has been laid, and in which your imagination has been moving,
is one subject to laws of retribution which, though not apparent on a
superficial glance, are yet in steady and consistent operation, and will
be quite sure to work their due effect, if time is only given to them.
Sagacious men know that this is in its best aspect the condition of
life. Certain of the ungodly may, notwithstanding the Psalmist, flourish
even through life like a green bay-tree; for providence, in external
appearance (far differently from the real truth of things, as we may one
day see it), works by a scheme of averages. Most people who ought to
succeed, do succeed; most people who do fail, ought to fail. But there
is no exact adjustment of ‘mark’ to merit; the competitive examination
system appears to have an origin more recent than the creation of
the world;—‘on the whole,’ ‘speaking generally,’ ‘looking at life as
a whole,’ are the words in which we must describe the providential
adjustment of visible good and evil to visible goodness and badness.
And when we look more closely, we see that these general results are
the consequences of certain principles which work half unseen, and
which are effectual in the main, though thwarted here and there. It
is this comprehensive though inexact distribution of good and evil,
which is suited to the novelist, and it is exactly this which Scott
instinctively adopted. Taking a firm and genial view of the common facts
of life,—seeing it as an experienced observer and tried man of action,—he
could not help giving the representation of it which is insensibly borne
in on the minds of such persons. He delineates it as a world moving
according to laws which are always producing their effect, never _have_
produced it; sometimes fall short a little; are always nearly successful.
Good sense produces its effect, as well as good intention; ability is
valuable as well as virtue. It is this peculiarity which gives to his
works, more than anything else, the life-likeness which distinguishes
them; the average of the copy is struck on the same scale as that of
reality; an unexplained, uncommented-on adjustment works in the one, just
as a hidden, imperceptible principle of apportionment operates in the
other.
The romantic susceptibility of Scott’s imagination is as obvious in his
novels as his matter-of-fact sagacity. We can find much of it in the
place in which we should naturally look first for it,—his treatment of
his heroines. We are no indiscriminate admirers of these young ladies,
and shall shortly try to show how much they are inferior as imaginative
creations to similar creations of the very highest artists. But the mode
in which the writer speaks of them everywhere indicates an imagination
continually under the illusion which we term romance. A gentle tone
of manly admiration pervades the whole delineation of their words and
actions. If we look carefully at the narratives of some remarkable
female novelists—it would be invidious to give the instances by name—we
shall be struck at once with the absence of this; they do not half like
their heroines. It would be satirical to say that they were jealous of
them; but it is certain that they analyse the mode in which their charms
produce their effects, and the _minutiæ_ of their operation, much in the
same way in which a slightly jealous lady examines the claims of the
heroines of society. The same writers have invented the atrocious species
of plain heroines. Possibly none of the frauds which are now so much the
topic of common remark are so irritating, as that to which the purchaser
of a novel is a victim on finding that he has only to peruse a narrative
of the conduct and sentiments of an ugly lady. ‘Two-and-sixpence to
know the heart which has high cheek-bones!’ Was there ever such an
imposition? Scott would have recoiled from such a conception. Even
Jeanie Deans, though no heroine, like Flora Macivor, is described as
‘comely,’ and capable of looking almost pretty when required, and she
has a compensating set-off in her sister, who is beautiful as well as
unwise. Speaking generally, as is the necessity of criticism, Scott makes
his heroines, at least by profession, attractive, and dwells on their
attractiveness, though not with the wild ecstasy of insane youth, yet
with the tempered and mellow admiration common to genial men of this
world. Perhaps at times we are rather displeased at his explicitness,
and disposed to hang back and carp at the admirable qualities displayed
to us. But this is only a stronger evidence of the peculiarity which
we speak of,—of the unconscious sentiments inseparable from Scott’s
imagination.
The same romantic tinge undeniably shows itself in Scott’s pictures of
the past. Many exceptions have been taken to the detail of mediæval
life as it is described to us in _Ivanhoe_; but one merit will always
remain to it, and will be enough to secure to it immense popularity. It
describes the middle ages as we should have wished them to have been. We
do not mean that the delineation satisfies those accomplished admirers of
the old Church system who fancy that they have found among the prelates
and barons of the fourteenth century a close approximation to the
theocracy which they would recommend for our adoption. On the contrary,
the theological merits of the middle ages are not prominent in Scott’s
delineation. ‘Dogma’ was not in his way: a cheerful man of the world is
not anxious for a precise definition of peculiar doctrines. The charm of
_Ivanhoe_ is addressed to a simpler sort of imagination, to that kind
of boyish fancy which idolises mediæval society as the ‘fighting time.’
Every boy has heard of tournaments, and has a firm persuasion that in
an age of tournaments life was thoroughly well understood. A martial
society, where men fought hand to hand on good horses with large lances,
in peace for pleasure, and in war for business, seems the very ideal of
perfection to a bold and simply fanciful boy. _Ivanhoe_ spreads before
him the full landscape of such a realm, with Richard Cœur-de-Lion, a
black horse, and the passage of arms at Ashby. Of course he admires it,
and thinks there was never such a writer, and will never more be such a
world. And a mature critic will share his admiration, at least to the
extent of admitting that nowhere else have the elements of a martial
romance been so gorgeously accumulated without becoming oppressive; their
fanciful charm been so powerfully delineated, and yet so constantly
relieved by touches of vigorous sagacity. One single fact shows how great
the romantic illusion is. The pressure of painful necessity is scarcely
so great in this novel, as in novels of the same writer in which the
scene is laid in modern times. Much may be said in favour of the mediæval
system as contradistinguished from existing society; much has been said.
But no one can maintain that general comfort was as much diffused as
it is now. A certain ease pervades the structure of later society. Our
houses may not last so long, are not so picturesque, will leave no such
ruins behind them; but they are warmed with hot water, have no draughts,
and contain sofas instead of rushes. A slight daily unconscious luxury
is hardly ever wanting to the dwellers in civilisation; like the gentle
air of a genial climate, it is a perpetual minute enjoyment. The absence
of this marks a rude barbaric time. We may avail ourselves of rough
pleasures, stirring amusements, exciting actions, strange rumours; but
life is hard and harsh. The cold air of the keen North may brace and
invigorate, but it cannot soothe us. All sensible people know that the
middle ages must have been very uncomfortable; there was a difficulty
about ‘good food;’—almost insuperable obstacles to the cultivation of
nice detail and small enjoyment. No one knew the abstract facts on which
this conclusion rests better than Scott; but his delineation gives
no general idea of the result. A thoughtless reader rises with the
impression that the middle ages had the same elements of happiness which
we have at present, and that they had fighting besides. We do not assert
that this tenet is explicitly taught; on the contrary, many facts are
explained, and many customs elucidated from which a discriminating and
deducing reader would infer the meanness of poverty and the harshness of
barbarism. But these less imposing traits escape the rapid, and still
more the boyish reader. His general impression is one of romance; and
though, when roused, Scott was quite able to take a distinct view of the
opposing facts, he liked his own mind to rest for the most part in the
same pleasing illusion.
The same sort of historical romance is shown likewise in Scott’s picture
of remarkable historical characters. His Richard I. is the traditional
Richard, with traits heightened and ennobled in perfect conformity to
the spirit of tradition. Some illustration of the same quality might be
drawn from his delineations of the Puritan rebellions and the Cavalier
enthusiasm. We might show that he ever dwells on the traits and incidents
most attractive to a genial and spirited imagination. But the most
remarkable instance of the power which romantic illusion exercised over
him, is his delineation of Mary Queen of Scots. He refused at one time
of his life to write a biography of that princess ‘because his opinion
was contrary to his feeling.’ He evidently considered her guilt to be
clearly established, and thought, with a distinguished lawyer, that
he should ‘direct a jury to find her guilty;’ but his fancy, like that
of most of his countrymen, took a peculiar and special interest in the
beautiful lady who, at any rate, had suffered so much and so fatally at
the hands of a queen of England. He could not bring himself to dwell with
nice accuracy on the evidence which substantiates her criminality, or on
the still clearer indications of that unsound and over-crafty judgment,
which was the fatal inheritance of the Stuart family, and which, in spite
of advantages that scarcely any other family in the world has enjoyed,
has made their name an historical by-word for misfortune. The picture in
the _Abbot_, one of the best historical pictures which Scott has given
us, is principally the picture of the Queen as the fond tradition of his
countrymen exhibited her. Her entire innocence, it is true, is never
alleged: but the enthusiasm of her followers is dwelt on with approving
sympathy; their confidence is set forth at large; her influence over
them is skilfully delineated; the fascination of charms chastened by
misfortune is delicately indicated. We see a complete picture of the
beautiful queen, of the suffering and sorrowful, but yet not insensible
woman. Scott could not, however, as a close study will show us, quite
conceal the unfavourable nature of his fundamental opinion. In one
remarkable passage the struggle of the judgment is even conspicuous,
and in others the sagacity of the practised lawyer,—the ‘thread of the
attorney,’ as he used to call it, in his nature,—qualifies and modifies
the sentiment hereditary in his countrymen, and congenial to himself.
This romantic imagination is a habit or power (as we may choose to call
it) of mind, which is almost essential to the highest success in the
historical novel. The aim, at any rate the effect, of this class of
works seems to be to deepen and confirm the received view of historical
personages. A great and acute writer may, from an accurate study of
original documents, discover that those impressions are erroneous, and
by a process of elaborate argument substitute others which he deems more
accurate. But this can only be effected by writing a regular history.
The essence of the achievement is the proof. If Mr. Froude had put
forward his view of Henry the Eighth’s character in a professed novel, he
would have been laughed at. It is only by a rigid adherence to attested
facts and authentic documents, that a view so original could obtain even
a hearing. We start back with a little anger from a representation which
is avowedly imaginative, and which contradicts our impressions. We do not
like to have our opinions disturbed by reasoning; but it is impertinent
to attempt to disturb them by fancies. A writer of the historical novel
is bound by the popular conception of his subject; and commonly it will
be found that this popular impression is to some extent a romantic one.
An element of exaggeration clings to the popular judgment: great vices
are made greater, great virtues greater also; interesting incidents
are made more interesting, softer legends more soft. The novelist who
disregards this tendency will do so at the peril of his popularity. His
business is to make attraction more attractive, and not to impair the
pleasant pictures of ready-made romance by an attempt at grim reality.
We may therefore sum up the indications of this characteristic excellence
of Scott’s novels by saying, that more than any novelist he has given us
fresh pictures of practical human society, with its cares and troubles,
its excitements and its pleasures; that he has delineated more distinctly
than any one else the framework in which this society inheres, and by
the boundaries of which it is shaped and limited; that he has made more
clear the way in which strange and eccentric characters grow out of that
ordinary and usual system of life; that he has extended his view over
several periods of society, and given an animated description of the
external appearance of each, and a firm representation of its social
institutions; that he has shown very graphically what we may call the
worldly laws of moral government; and that over all these he has spread
the glow of sentiment natural to a manly mind, and an atmosphere of
generosity congenial to a cheerful one. It is from the collective effect
of these causes, and from the union of sense and sentiment which is the
principle of them all, that Scott derives the peculiar healthiness which
distinguishes him. There are no such books as his for the sick-room, or
for freshening the painful intervals of a morbid mind. Mere sense is
dull, mere sentiment unsubstantial; a sensation of genial healthiness is
only given by what combines the solidity of the one and the brightening
charm of the other.
Some guide to Scott’s defects, or to the limitations of his genius, if
we would employ a less ungenial and perhaps more correct expression, is
to be discovered, as usual, from the consideration of his characteristic
excellence. As it is his merit to give bold and animated pictures of
this world, it is his defect to give but insufficient representations of
qualities which this world does not exceedingly prize,—of such as do not
thrust themselves very forward in it,—of such as are in some sense above
it. We may illustrate this in several ways.
One of the parts of human nature which are systematically omitted in
Scott, is the searching and abstract intellect. This did not lie in his
way. No man had a stronger sagacity, better adapted for the guidance of
common men, and the conduct of common transactions. Few could hope to
form a more correct opinion on things and subjects which were brought
before him in actual life; no man had a more useful intellect. But on the
other hand, as will be generally observed to be the case, no one was less
inclined to that probing and seeking and anxious inquiry into things in
general which is the necessity of some minds, and a sort of intellectual
famine in their nature. He had no call to investigate the theory of
the universe, and he would not have been able to comprehend those who
did. Such a mind as Shelley’s would have been entirely removed from his
comprehension. He had no call to mix ‘awful talk and asking looks’ with
his love of the visible scene. He could not have addressed the universe:
‘I have watched
Thy shadow, and the darkness of thy steps;
And my heart ever gazes on the depth
Of thy deep mysteries. I have made my bed
In charnels and on coffins, where black death
Keeps record of the trophies won from thee,
Hoping to still these obstinate questionings
Of thee and thine, by forcing some lone ghost,
Thy messenger, to render up the tale
Of what we are.’