1.[37]

1. On the first mild--or, at least, the first bright--day of March, in

this year, I walked through what was once a country lane, between the

hostelry of the Half-moon at the bottom of Herne Hill, and the secluded

College of Dulwich.

In my young days, Croxsted Lane was a green byroad traversable for some

distance by carts; but rarely so traversed, and, for the most part,

little else than a narrow strip of untilled field, separated by

blackberry hedges from the better-cared-for meadows on each side of it:

growing more weeds, therefore, than they, and perhaps in spring a

primrose or two--white archangel--daisies plenty, and purple thistles in

autumn. A slender rivulet, boasting little of its brightness, for there

are no springs at Dulwich, yet fed purely enough by the rain and morning

dew, here trickled--there loitered--through the long grass beneath the

hedges, and expanded itself, where it might, into moderately clear and

deep pools, in which, under their veils of duckweed, a fresh-water shell

or two, sundry curious little skipping shrimps, any quantity of tadpoles

in their time, and even sometimes a tittlebat, offered themselves to my

boyhood's pleased, and not inaccurate, observation. There, my mother and

I used to gather the first buds of the hawthorn; and there, in after

years, I used to walk in the summer shadows, as in a place wilder and

sweeter than our garden, to think over any passage I wanted to make

better than usual in _Modern Painters_.

So, as aforesaid, on the first kindly day of this year, being thoughtful

more than usual of those old times, I went to look again at the place.

2. Often, both in those days, and since, I have put myself hard to it,

vainly, to find words wherewith to tell of beautiful things; but beauty

has been in the world since the world was made, and human language can

make a shift, somehow, to give account of it, whereas the peculiar

forces of devastation induced by modern city life have only entered the

world lately; and no existing terms of language known to me are enough

to describe the forms of filth, and modes of ruin, that varied

themselves along the course of Croxsted Lane. The fields on each side of

it are now mostly dug up for building, or cut through into gaunt corners

and nooks of blind ground by the wild crossings and concurrencies of

three railroads. Half a dozen handfuls of new cottages, with Doric

doors, are dropped about here and there among the gashed ground: the

lane itself, now entirely grassless, is a deep-rutted, heavy-hillocked

cart-road, diverging gatelessly into various brickfields or pieces of

waste; and bordered on each side by heaps of--Hades only knows

what!--mixed dust of every unclean thing that can crumble in drought,

and mildew of every unclean thing that can rot or rust in damp: ashes

and rags, beer-bottles and old shoes, battered pans, smashed crockery,

shreds of nameless clothes, door-sweepings, floor-sweepings, kitchen

garbage, back-garden sewage, old iron, rotten timber jagged with

out-torn nails, cigar-ends, pipe-bowls, cinders, bones, and ordure,

indescribable; and, variously kneaded into, sticking to, or fluttering

foully here and there over all these,--remnants broadcast, of every

manner of newspaper, advertisement or big-lettered bill, festering and

flaunting out their last publicity in the pits of stinking dust and

mortal slime.

3. The lane ends now where its prettiest windings once began; being cut

off by a cross-road leading out of Dulwich to a minor railway station:

and on the other side of this road, what was of old the daintiest

intricacy of its solitude is changed into a straight, and evenly

macadamized carriage drive between new houses of extreme respectability,

with good attached gardens and offices--most of these tenements being

larger--all more pretentious, and many, I imagine, held at greatly

higher rent than my father's, tenanted for twenty years at Herne Hill.

And it became matter of curious meditation to me what must here become

of children resembling my poor little dreamy quondam self in temper, and

thus brought up at the same distance from London, and in the same or

better circumstances of worldly fortune; but with only Croxsted Lane in

its present condition for their country walk. The trimly kept road

before their doors, such as one used to see in the fashionable suburbs

of Cheltenham or Leamington, presents nothing to their study but gravel,

and gas-lamp posts; the modern addition of a vermilion letter-pillar

contributing indeed to the splendor, but scarcely to the interest of the

scene; and a child of any sense or fancy would hastily contrive escape

from such a barren desert of politeness, and betake itself to

investigation, such as might be feasible, of the natural history of

Croxsted Lane.

4. But, for its sense or fancy, what food, or stimulus, can it find, in

that foul causeway of its youthful pilgrimage? What would have happened

to myself, so directed, I cannot clearly imagine. Possibly, I might have

got interested in the old iron and wood-shavings; and become an engineer

or a carpenter: but for the children of to-day, accustomed, from the

instant they are out of their cradles, to the sight of this infinite

nastiness, prevailing as a fixed condition of the universe, over the

face of nature, and accompanying all the operations of industrious man,

what is to be the scholastic issue? unless, indeed, the thrill of

scientific vanity in the primary analysis of some unheard-of process of

corruption--or the reward of microscopic research in the sight of worms

with more legs, and acari of more curious generation than ever vivified

the more simply smelling plasma of antiquity.

One result of such elementary education is, however, already certain;

namely, that the pleasure which we may conceive taken by the children of

the coming time, in the analysis of physical corruption, guides, into

fields more dangerous and desolate, the expatiation of an imaginative

literature: and that the reactions of moral disease upon itself, and

the conditions of languidly monstrous character developed in an

atmosphere of low vitality, have become the most valued material of

modern fiction, and the most eagerly discussed texts of modern

philosophy.

5. The many concurrent reasons for this mischief may, I believe, be

massed under a few general heads.[38]

I. There is first the hot fermentation and unwholesome secrecy of the

population crowded into large cities, each mote in the misery lighter,

as an individual soul, than a dead leaf, but becoming oppressive and

infectious each to his neighbor, in the smoking mass of decay. The

resulting modes of mental ruin and distress are continually new; and in

a certain sense, worth study in their monstrosity: they have accordingly

developed a corresponding science of fiction, concerned mainly with the

description of such forms of disease, like the botany of leaf-lichens.

In De Balzac's story of _Father Goriot_, a grocer makes a large fortune,

of which he spends on himself as much as may keep him alive; and on his

two daughters, all that can promote their pleasures or their pride. He

marries them to men of rank, supplies their secret expenses, and

provides for his favorite a separate and clandestine establishment with

her lover. On his death-bed, he sends for this favorite daughter, who

wishes to come, and hesitates for a quarter of an hour between doing so,

and going to a ball at which it has been for the last month her chief

ambition to be seen. She finally goes to the ball.

The story is, of course, one of which the violent contrasts and spectral

catastrophe could only take place, or be conceived, in a large city. A

village grocer cannot make a large fortune, cannot marry his daughters

to titled squires, and cannot die without having his children brought to

him, if in the neighborhood, by fear of village gossip, if for no better

cause.

6. II. But a much more profound feeling than this mere curiosity of

science in morbid phenomena is concerned in the production of the

carefulest forms of modern fiction. The disgrace and grief resulting

from the mere trampling pressure and electric friction of town life,

become to the sufferers peculiarly mysterious in their undeservedness,

and frightful in their inevitableness. The power of all surroundings

over them for evil; the incapacity of their own minds to refuse the

pollution, and of their own wills to oppose the weight, of the

staggering mass that chokes and crushes them into perdition, brings

every law of healthy existence into question with them, and every

alleged method of help and hope into doubt. Indignation, without any

calming faith in justice, and self-contempt, without any curative

self-reproach, dull the intelligence, and degrade the conscience, into

sullen incredulity of all sunshine outside the dunghill, or breeze

beyond the wafting of its impurity; and at last a philosophy develops

itself, partly satiric, partly consolatory, concerned only with the

regenerative vigor of manure, and the necessary obscurities of fimetic

Providence; showing how everybody's fault is somebody else's, how

infection has no law, digestion no will, and profitable dirt no

dishonor.

And thus an elaborate and ingenious scholasticism, in what may be called

the Divinity of Decomposition, has established itself in connection with

the more recent forms of romance, giving them at once a complacent tone

of clerical dignity, and an agreeable dash of heretical impudence; while

the inculcated doctrine has the double advantage of needing no laborious

scholarship for its foundation, and no painful self-denial for its

practice.

7. III. The monotony of life in the central streets of any great modern

city, but especially in those of London, where every emotion intended to

be derived by men from the sight of nature, or the sense of art, is

forbidden forever, leaves the craving of the heart for a sincere, yet

changeful, interest, to be fed from one source only. Under natural

conditions the degree of mental excitement necessary to bodily health is

provided by the course of the seasons, and the various skill and

fortune of agriculture. In the country every morning of the year brings

with it a new aspect of springing or fading nature; a new duty to be

fulfilled upon earth, and a new promise or warning in heaven. No day is

without its innocent hope, its special prudence, its kindly gift, and

its sublime danger; and in every process of wise husbandry, and every

effort of contending or remedial courage, the wholesome passions, pride,

and bodily power of the laborer are excited and exerted in happiest

unison. The companionship of domestic, the care of serviceable, animals,

soften and enlarge his life with lowly charities, and discipline him in

familiar wisdoms and unboastful fortitudes; while the divine laws of

seedtime which cannot be recalled, harvest which cannot be hastened, and

winter in which no man can work, compel the impatiences and coveting of

his heart into labor too submissive to be anxious, and rest too sweet to

be wanton. What thought can enough comprehend the contrast between such

life, and that in streets where summer and winter are only alternations

of heat and cold; where snow never fell white, nor sunshine clear; where

the ground is only a pavement, and the sky no more than the glass roof

of an arcade; where the utmost power of a storm is to choke the gutters,

and the finest magic of spring, to change mud into dust: where--chief

and most fatal difference in state--there is no interest of occupation

for any of the inhabitants but the routine of counter or desk within

doors, and the effort to pass each other without collision outside; so

that from morning to evening the only possible variation of the monotony

of the hours, and lightening of the penalty of existence, must be some

kind of mischief, limited, unless by more than ordinary godsend of

fatality, to the fall of a horse, or the slitting of a pocket?

8. I said that under these laws of inanition, the craving of the human

heart for some kind of excitement could be supplied from _one_ source

only. It might have been thought by any other than a sternly tentative

philosopher, that the denial of their natural food to human feelings

would have provoked a reactionary desire for it; and that the

dreariness of the street would have been gilded by dreams of pastoral

felicity. Experience has shown the fact to be otherwise; the thoroughly

trained Londoner can enjoy no other excitement than that to which he has

been accustomed, but asks for _that_ in continually more ardent or more

virulent concentration; and the ultimate power of fiction to entertain

him is by varying to his fancy the modes, and defining for his dullness

the horrors, of Death. In the single novel of "Bleak House" there are

nine deaths (or left for death's, in the drop scene) carefully wrought

out or led up to, either by way of pleasing surprise, as the baby's at

the brick-maker's, or finished in their threatenings and sufferings,

with as much enjoyment as can be contrived in the anticipation, and as

much pathology as can be concentrated in the description. Under the

following varieties of method:--

One by assassination Mr. Tulkinghorn.

One by starvation, with phthisis Joe.

One by chagrin Richard.

One by spontaneous combustion Mr. Krook.

One by sorrow Lady Dedlock's lover.

One by remorse Lady Dedlock.

One by insanity Miss Flite.

One by paralysis Sir Leicester.

Besides the baby, by fever, and a lively young Frenchwoman left to be

hanged.

And all this, observe, not in a tragic, adventurous, or military story,

but merely as the further enlivenment of a narrative intended to be

amusing; and as a properly representative average of the statistics of

civilian mortality in the center of London.

9. Observe further, and chiefly. It is not the mere number of deaths

(which, if we count the odd troopers in the last scene, is exceeded in

"Old Mortality," and reached, within one or two, both in "Waverley" and

"Guy Mannering") that marks the peculiar tone of the modern novel. It is

the fact that all these deaths, but one, are of inoffensive, or at least

in the world's estimate, respectable persons; and that they are all

grotesquely either violent or miserable, purporting thus to illustrate

the modern theology that the appointed destiny of a large average of our

population is to die like rats in a drain, either by trap or poison.

Not, indeed, that a lawyer in full practice can be usually supposed as

faultless in the eye of Heaven as a dove or a woodcock; but it is not,

in former divinities, thought the will of Providence that he should be

dropped by a shot from a client behind his fire-screen, and retrieved in

the morning by his housemaid under the chandelier. Neither is Lady

Dedlock less reprehensible in her conduct than many women of fashion

have been and will be: but it would not therefore have been thought

poetically just, in old-fashioned morality, that she should be found by

her daughter lying dead, with her face in the mud of a St. Giles's

churchyard.

10. In the work of the great masters death is always either heroic,

deserved, or quiet and natural (unless their purpose be totally and

deeply tragic, when collateral meaner death is permitted, like that of

Polonius or Roderigo). In "Old Mortality," four of the deaths,

Bothwell's, Ensign Grahame's, Macbriar's, and Evandale's, are

magnificently heroic; Burley's and Oliphant's long deserved, and swift;

the troopers', met in the discharge of their military duty, and the old

miser's as gentle as the passing of a cloud, and almost beautiful in its

last words of--now unselfish--care.

* * * * *

"Ailie" (he aye ca'd me Ailie, we were auld acquaintance), "Ailie, take

ye care and hand the gear weel thegither; for the name of Morton of

Milnwood's gane out like the last sough of an auld sang." And sae he

fell out o' ae dwam into another, and ne'er spak a word mair, unless it

something we you'dna mak out, about a dipped candle being gude eneugh

to see to dee wi'. He cou'd ne'er bide to see a molded ane, and there

was ane, by ill luck, on the table.

* * * * *

In "Guy Mannering," the murder, though unpremeditated, of a single

person, (himself not entirely innocent, but at least by heartlessness in

a cruel function earning his fate,) is avenged to the uttermost on all

the men conscious of the crime; Mr. Bertram's death, like that of his

wife, brief in pain, and each told in the space of half a dozen lines;

and that of the heroine of the tale, self-devoted, heroic in the

highest, and happy.

Nor is it ever to be forgotten, in the comparison of Scott's with

inferior work, that his own splendid powers were, even in early life,

tainted, and in his latter years destroyed, by modern conditions of

commercial excitement, then first, but rapidly, developing themselves.

There are parts even in his best novels colored to meet tastes which he

despised; and many pages written in his later ones to lengthen his

article for the indiscriminate market.

11. But there was one weakness of which his healthy mind remained

incapable to the last. In modern stories prepared for more refined or

fastidious audiences than those of Dickens, the funereal excitement is

obtained, for the most part, not by the infliction of violent or

disgusting death; but in the suspense, the pathos, and the more or less

by all felt, and recognized, mortal phenomena of the sick-room. The

temptation, to weak writers, of this order of subject is especially

great, because the study of it from the living--or dying--model is so

easy, and to many has been the most impressive part of their own

personal experience; while, if the description be given even with

mediocre accuracy, a very large section of readers will admire its

truth, and cherish its melancholy. Few authors of second or third rate

genius can either record or invent a probable conversation in ordinary

life; but few, on the other hand, are so destitute of observant faculty

as to be unable to chronicle the broken syllables and languid movements

of an invalid. The easily rendered, and too surely recognized, image of

familiar suffering is felt at once to be real where all else had been

false; and the historian of the gestures of fever and words of delirium

can count on the applause of a gratified audience as surely as the

dramatist who introduces on the stage of his flagging action a carriage

that can be driven or a fountain that will flow. But the masters of

strong imagination disdain such work, and those of deep sensibility

shrink from it.[39] Only under conditions of personal weakness,

presently to be noted, would Scott comply with the cravings of his lower

audience in scenes of terror like the death of Front-de-Boeuf. But he

never once withdrew the sacred curtain of the sick-chamber, nor

permitted the disgrace of wanton tears round the humiliation of

strength, or the wreck of beauty.

12. IV. No exception to this law of reverence will be found in the

scenes in Coeur de Lion's illness introductory to the principal

incident in the "Talisman." An inferior writer would have made the king

charge in imagination at the head of his chivalry, or wander in dreams

by the brooks of Aquitaine; but Scott allows us to learn no more

startling symptoms of the king's malady than that he was restless and

impatient, and could not wear his armor. Nor is any bodily weakness, or

crisis of danger, permitted to disturb for an instant the royalty of

intelligence and heart in which he examines, trusts and obeys the

physician whom his attendants fear.

Yet the choice of the main subject in this story and its companion--the

trial, to a point of utter torture, of knightly faith, and several

passages in the conduct of both, more especially the exaggerated scenes

in the House of Baldringham, and hermitage of Engedi, are signs of the

gradual decline in force of intellect and soul which those who love

Scott best have done him the worst injustice in their endeavors to

disguise or deny. The mean anxieties, moral humiliations, and

mercilessly demanded brain-toil, which killed him, show their sepulchral

grasp for many and many a year before their final victory; and the

states of more or less dulled, distorted, and polluted imagination which

culminate in "Castle Dangerous" cast a Stygian hue over "St. Ronan's

Well," "The Fair Maid of Perth," and "Anne of Geierstein," which lowers

them, the first altogether, the other two at frequent intervals, into

fellowship with the normal disease which festers throughout the whole

body of our lower fictitious literature.

13. Fictitious! I use the ambiguous word deliberately; for it is

impossible to distinguish in these tales of the prison-house how far

their vice and gloom are thrown into their manufacture only to meet a

vile demand, and how far they are an integral condition of thought in

the minds of men trained from their youth up in the knowledge of

Londinian and Parisian misery. The speciality of the plague is a delight

in the exposition of the relations between guilt and decrepitude; and I

call the results of it literature "of the prison-house," because the

thwarted habits of body and mind, which are the punishment of reckless

crowding in cities, become, in the issue of that punishment, frightful

subjects of exclusive interest to themselves; and the art of fiction in

which they finally delight is only the more studied arrangement and

illustration, by colored fire-lights, of the daily bulletins of their

own wretchedness, in the prison calendar, the police news, and the

hospital report.

14. The reader will perhaps be surprised at my separating the greatest

work of Dickens, "Oliver Twist," with honor, from the loathsome mass to

which it typically belongs. That book is an earnest and uncaricatured

record of states of criminal life, written with didactic purpose, full

of the gravest instruction, nor destitute of pathetic studies of noble

passion. Even the "Mysteries of Paris" and Gaboriau's "Crime d'Orcival"

are raised, by their definiteness of historical intention and

forewarning anxiety, far above the level of their order, and may be

accepted as photographic evidence of an otherwise incredible

civilization, corrupted in the infernal fact of it, down to the genesis

of such figures as the Vicomte d'Orcival, the Stabber,[40] the Skeleton,

and the She-wolf. But the effectual head of the whole cretinous school

is the renowned novel in which the hunchbacked lover watches the

execution of his mistress from the tower of Notre-Dame; and its strength

passes gradually away into the anatomical preparations, for the general

market, of novels like "Poor Miss Finch," in which the heroine is blind,

the hero epileptic, and the obnoxious brother is found dead with his

hands dropped off, in the Arctic regions.[41]

15. This literature of the Prison-house, understanding by the word not

only the cell of Newgate, but also and even more definitely the cell of

the Hôtel-Dieu, the Hôpital des Fous, and the grated corridor with the

dripping slabs of the Morgue, having its central root thus in the Ile de

Paris--or historically and pre-eminently the "Cité de Paris"--is, when

understood deeply, the precise counter-corruption of the religion of the

Sainte Chapelle, just as the worst forms of bodily and mental ruin are

the corruption of love. I have therefore called it "Fiction mécroyante,"

with literal accuracy and precision: according to the explanation of the

word, which the reader may find in any good French dictionary,[42] and

round its Arctic pole in the Morgue, he may gather into one Caina of

gelid putrescence the entire product of modern infidel imagination,

amusing itself with destruction of the body, and busying itself with

aberration of the mind.

16. Aberration, palsy, or plague, observe, as distinguished from normal

evil, just as the venom of rabies or cholera differs from that of a wasp

or a viper. The life of the insect and serpent deserves, or at least

permits, our thoughts; not so the stages of agony in the fury-driven

hound. There is some excuse, indeed, for the pathologic labor of the

modern novelist in the fact that he cannot easily, in a city population,

find a healthy mind to vivisect: but the greater part of such amateur

surgery is the struggle, in an epoch of wild literary competition, to

obtain novelty of material. The varieties of aspect and color in healthy

fruit, be it sweet or sour, may be within certain limits described

exhaustively. Not so the blotches of its conceivable blight: and while

the symmetries of integral human character can only be traced by

harmonious and tender skill, like the branches of a living tree, the

faults and gaps of one gnawed away by corroding accident can be shuffled

into senseless change like the wards of a Chubb lock.

17. V. It is needless to insist on the vast field for this dice-cast or

card-dealt calamity which opens itself in the ignorance, money-interest,

and mean passion, of city marriage. Peasants know each other as

children--meet, as they grow up in testing labor; and if a stout

farmer's son marries a handless girl, it is his own fault. Also in the

patrician families of the field, the young people know what they are

doing, and marry a neighboring estate, or a covetable title, with some

conception of the responsibilities they undertake. But even among these,

their season in the confused metropolis creates licentious and

fortuitous temptation before unknown; and in the lower middle orders, an

entirely new kingdom of discomfort and disgrace has been preached to

them in the doctrines of unbridled pleasure which are merely an apology

for their peculiar forms of ill-breeding. It is quite curious how often

the catastrophe, or the leading interest, of a modern novel, turns upon

the want, both in maid and bachelor, of the common self-command which

was taught to their grandmothers and grandfathers as the first element

of ordinarily decent behavior. Rashly inquiring the other day the plot

of a modern story[43] from a female friend, I elicited, after some

hesitation, that it hinged mainly on the young people's "forgetting

themselves in a boat;" and I perceive it to be accepted as nearly an

axiom in the code of modern civic chivalry that the strength of amiable

sentiment is proved by our incapacity on proper occasions to express,

and on improper ones to control it. The pride of a gentleman of the old

school used to be in his power of saying what he meant, and being silent

when he ought (not to speak of the higher nobleness which bestowed love

where it was honorable, and reverence where it was due); but the

automatic amours and involuntary proposals of recent romance acknowledge

little further law of morality than the instinct of an insect, or the

effervescence of a chemical mixture.

18. There is a pretty little story of Alfred de Musset's--"La Mouche,"

which, if the reader cares to glance at it, will save me further trouble

in explaining the disciplinarian authority of mere old-fashioned

politeness, as in some sort protective of higher things. It describes,

with much grace and precision, a state of society by no means

pre-eminently virtuous, or enthusiastically heroic; in which many people

do extremely wrong, and none sublimely right. But as there are heights

of which the achievement is unattempted, there are abysses to which fall

is barred; neither accident nor temptation will make any of the

principal personages swerve from an adopted resolution, or violate an

accepted principle of honor; people are expected as a matter of course

to speak with propriety on occasion, and to wait with patience when they

are bid: those who do wrong, admit it; those who do right don't boast of

it; everybody knows his own mind, and everybody has good manners.

19. Nor must it be forgotten that in the worst days of the

self-indulgence which destroyed the aristocracies of Europe, their

vices, however licentious, were never, in the fatal modern sense,

"unprincipled." The vainest believed in virtue; the vilest respected it.

"Chaque chose avait son nom,"[44] and the severest of English moralists

recognizes the accurate wit, the lofty intellect, and the unfretted

benevolence, which redeemed from vitiated surroundings the circle of

d'Alembert and Marmontel.[45]

I have said, with too slight praise, that the vainest, in those days,

"believed" in virtue. Beautiful and heroic examples of it were always

before them; nor was it without the secret significance attaching to

what may seem the least accidents in the work of a master, that Scott

gave to both his heroines of the age of revolution in England the name

of the queen of the highest order of English chivalry.[46]

20. It is to say little for the types of youth and maid which alone

Scott felt it a joy to imagine, or thought it honorable to portray, that

they act and feel in a sphere where they are never for an instant

liable to any of the weaknesses which disturb the calm, or shake the

resolution, of chastity and courage in a modern novel. Scott lived in a

country and time, when, from highest to lowest, but chiefly in that

dignified and nobly severe[47] middle class to which he himself

belonged, a habit of serene and stainless thought was as natural to the

people as their mountain air. Women like Rose Bradwardine and Ailie

Dinmont were the grace and guard of almost every household (God be

praised that the race of them is not yet extinct, for all that Mall or

Boulevard can do), and it has perhaps escaped the notice of even

attentive readers that the comparatively uninteresting character of Sir

Walter's heroes had always been studied among a class of youths who were

simply incapable of doing anything seriously wrong; and could only be

embarrassed by the consequences of their levity or imprudence.

21. But there is another difference in the woof of a Waverley novel from

the cobweb of a modern one, which depends on Scott's larger view of

human life. Marriage is by no means, in his conception of man and woman,

the most important business of their existence;[48] nor love the only

reward to be proposed to their virtue or exertion. It is not in his

reading of the laws of Providence a necessity that virtue should, either

by love or any other external blessing, be rewarded at all;[49] and

marriage is in all cases thought of as a constituent of the happiness of

life, but not as its only interest, still less its only aim. And upon

analyzing with some care the motives of his principal stories, we shall

often find that the love in them is merely a light by which the sterner

features of character are to be irradiated, and that the marriage of the

hero is as subordinate to the main bent of the story as Henry the

Fifth's courtship of Katherine is to the battle of Agincourt. Nay, the

fortunes of the person who is nominally the subject of the tale are

often little more than a background on which grander figures are to be

drawn, and deeper fates forthshadowed. The judgments between the faith

and chivalry of Scotland at Drumclog and Bothwell Bridge owe little of

their interest in the mind of a sensible reader to the fact that the

captain of the Popinjay is carried a prisoner to one battle, and returns

a prisoner from the other: and Scott himself, while he watches the white

sail that bears Queen Mary for the last time from her native land, very

nearly forgets to finish his novel, or to tell us--and with small sense

of any consolation to be had out of that minor circumstance,--that

"Roland and Catherine were united, spite of their differing faiths."

22. Neither let it be thought for an instant that the slight, and

sometimes scornful, glance with which Scott passes over scenes which a

novelist of our own day would have analyzed with the airs of a

philosopher, and painted with the curiosity of a gossip, indicates any

absence in his heart of sympathy with the great and sacred elements of

personal happiness. An era like ours, which has with diligence and

ostentation swept its heart clear of all the passions once known as

loyalty, patriotism, and piety, necessarily magnifies the apparent force

of the one remaining sentiment which sighs through the barren chambers,

or clings inextricably round the chasms of ruin; nor can it but regard

with awe the unconquerable spirit which still tempts or betrays the

sagacities of selfishness into error or frenzy which is believed to be

love.

That Scott was never himself, in the sense of the phrase as employed by

lovers of the Parisian school, "ivre d'amour," may be admitted without

prejudice to his sensibility,[50] and that he never knew "l'amor che

move 'l sol e l'altre stelle," was the chief, though unrecognized,

calamity of his deeply checkered life. But the reader of honor and

feeling will not therefore suppose that the love which Miss Vernon

sacrifices, stooping for an instant from her horse, is of less noble

stamp, or less enduring faith, than that which troubles and degrades the

whole existence of Consuelo; or that the affection of Jeanie Deans for

the companion of her childhood, drawn like a field of soft blue heaven

beyond the cloudy wrack of her sorrow, is less fully in possession of

her soul than the hesitating and self-reproachful impulses under which a

modern heroine forgets herself in a boat, or compromises herself in the

cool of the evening.

23. I do not wish to return over the waste ground we have traversed,

comparing, point by point, Scott's manner with those of Bermondsey and

the Faubourgs; but it may be, perhaps, interesting at this moment to

examine, with illustration from those Waverley novels which have so

lately _re_tracted the attention of a fair and gentle public,[51] the

universal conditions of "style," rightly so called, which are in all

ages, and above all local currents or wavering tides of temporary

manners, pillars of what is forever strong, and models of what is

forever fair.

But I must first define, and that within strict horizon, the works of

Scott, in which his perfect mind may be known, and his chosen ways

understood.

His great works of prose fiction, excepting only the first half-volume

of "Waverley," were all written in twelve years, 1814-26 (of his own age

forty-three to fifty-five), the actual time employed in their

composition being not more than a couple of months out of each year; and

during that time only the morning hours and spare minutes during the

professional day. "Though the first volume of 'Waverley' was begun long

ago, and actually lost for a time, yet the other two were begun and

finished between the 4th of June and the 1st of July, during all which I

attended my duty in court, and proceeded without loss of time or

hindrance of business."[52]

Few of the maxims for the enforcement of which, in "Modern Painters,"

long ago, I got the general character of a lover of paradox, are more

singular, or more sure, than the statement, apparently so encouraging to

the idle, that if a great thing can be done at all, it can be done

easily. But it is that kind of ease with which a tree blossoms after

long years of gathered strength, and all Scott's great writings were the

recreations of a mind confirmed in dutiful labor, and rich with organic

gathering of boundless resource.

Omitting from our count the two minor and ill-finished sketches of the

"Black Dwarf" and "Legend of Montrose," and, for a reason presently to

be noticed, the unhappy "St. Ronan's," the memorable romances of Scott

are eighteen, falling into three distinct groups, containing six each.

24. The first group is distinguished from the other two by characters of

strength and felicity which never more appeared after Scott was struck

down by his terrific illness in 1819. It includes "Waverley," "Guy

Mannering," "The Antiquary," "Rob Roy," "Old Mortality," and "The Heart

of Midlothian."

The composition of these occupied the mornings of his happiest days,

between the ages of forty-three and forty-eight. On the 8th of April,

1819 (he was forty-eight on the preceding 15th of August), he began for

the first time to dictate--being unable for the exertion of

writing--"The Bride of Lammermuir," "the affectionate Laidlaw beseeching

him to stop dictating when his audible suffering filled every pause.

'Nay, Willie,' he answered, 'only see that the doors are fast. I would

fain keep all the cry as well as all the wool to ourselves; but as for

giving over work, that can only be when I am in woolen.'"[53] From this

time forward the brightness of joy and sincerity of inevitable humor,

which perfected the imagery of the earlier novels, are wholly absent,

except in the two short intervals of health unaccountably restored, in

which he wrote "Redgauntlet" and "Nigel."

It is strange, but only a part of the general simplicity of Scott's

genius, that these revivals of earlier power were unconscious, and that

the time of extreme weakness in which he wrote "St. Ronan's Well," was

that in which he first asserted his own restoration.

25. It is also a deeply interesting characteristic of his noble nature

that he never gains anything by sickness; the whole man breathes or

faints as one creature: the ache that stiffens a limb chills his heart,

and every pang of his stomach paralyzes the brain. It is not so with

inferior minds, in the workings of which it is often impossible to

distinguish native from narcotic fancy, and the throbs of conscience

from those of indigestion. Whether in exaltation or languor, the colors

of mind are always morbid which gleam on the sea for the "Ancient

Mariner," and through the casements on "St. Agnes' Eve"; but Scott is at

once blinded and stultified by sickness; never has a fit of the cramp

without spoiling a chapter, and is perhaps the only author of vivid

imagination who never wrote a foolish word but when he was ill.

It remains only to be noticed on this point that any strong natural

excitement, affecting the deeper springs of his heart, would at once

restore his intellectual powers to their fullness, and that, far towards

their sunset: but that the strong will on which he prided himself,

though it could trample upon pain, silence grief, and compel industry,

never could warm his imagination, or clear the judgment in his darker

hours.

I believe that this power of the heart over the intellect is common to

all great men: but what the special character of emotion was, that alone

could lift Scott above the power of death, I am about to ask the

reader, in a little while, to observe with joyful care.

26. The first series of romances then, above-named, are all that exhibit

the emphasis of his unharmed faculties. The second group, composed in

the three years subsequent to illness all but mortal, bear every one of

them more or less the seal of it.

They consist of the "Bride of Lammermuir," "Ivanhoe," the "Monastery,"

the "Abbot," "Kenilworth," and the "Pirate."[54] The marks of broken

health on all these are essentially twofold--prevailing melancholy, and

fantastic improbability. Three of the tales are agonizingly tragic, the

"Abbot" scarcely less so in its main event, and "Ivanhoe" deeply wounded

through all its bright panoply; while even in that most powerful of the

series the impossible archeries and ax-strokes, the incredibly opportune

appearances of Locksley, the death of Ulrica, and the resuscitation of

Athelstane, are partly boyish, partly feverish. Caleb in the "Bride,"

Triptolemus and Halcro in the "Pirate," are all laborious, and the first

incongruous; half a volume of the "Abbot" is spent in extremely dull

detail of Roland's relations with his fellow-servants and his mistress,

which have nothing whatever to do with the future story; and the lady of

Avenel herself disappears after the first volume, "like a snaw-wreath

when it's thaw, Jeanie." The public has for itself pronounced on the

"Monastery," though as much too harshly as it has foolishly praised the

horrors of "Ravenswood" and the nonsense of "Ivanhoe"; because the

modern public finds in the torture and adventure of these, the kind of

excitement which it seeks at an opera, while it has no sympathy whatever

with the pastoral happiness of Glendearg, or with the lingering

simplicities of superstition which give historical likelihood to the

legend of the White Lady.

But both this despised tale and its sequel have Scott's heart in them.

The first was begun to refresh himself in the intervals of artificial

labor on "Ivanhoe." "It was a relief," he said, "to interlay the scenery

most familiar to me[55] with the strange world for which I had to draw

so much on imagination." Through all the closing scenes of the second he

is raised to his own true level by his love for the queen. And within

the code of Scott's work to which I am about to appeal for illustration

of his essential powers, I accept the "Monastery" and "Abbot," and

reject from it the remaining four of this group.

27. The last series contains two quite noble ones, "Redgauntlet" and

"Nigel"; two of very high value, "Durward" and "Woodstock"; the slovenly

and diffuse "Peveril," written for the trade;[56] the sickly "Tales of

the Crusaders," and the entirely broken and diseased "St. Ronan's Well."

This last I throw out of count altogether, and of the rest, accept only

the four first named as sound work; so that the list of the novels in

which I propose to examine his methods and ideal standards, reduces

itself to these following twelve (named in order of production):

"Waverley," "Guy Mannering," the "Antiquary," "Rob Roy," "Old

Mortality," the "Heart of Midlothian," the "Monastery," the "Abbot,"

"Redgauntlet," the "Fortunes of Nigel," "Quentin Durward," and

"Woodstock."[57]

28. It is, however, too late to enter on my subject in this article,

which I may fitly close by pointing out some of the merely verbal

characteristics of his style, illustrative in little ways of the

questions we have been examining, and chiefly of the one which may be

most embarrassing to many readers, the difference, namely, between

character and disease.

One quite distinctive charm in the Waverleys is their modified use of

the Scottish dialect; but it has not generally been observed, either by

their imitators, or the authors of different taste who have written for

a later public, that there is a difference between the dialect of a

language, and its corruption.

A dialect is formed in any district where there are persons of

intelligence enough to use the language itself in all its fineness and

force, but under the particular conditions of life, climate, and temper,

which introduce words peculiar to the scenery, forms of word and idioms

of sentence peculiar to the race, and pronunciations indicative of their

character and disposition.

Thus "burn" (of a streamlet) is a word possible only in a country where

there are brightly running waters, "lassie," a word possible only where

girls are as free as the rivulets, and "auld," a form of the southern

"old," adopted by a race of finer musical ear than the English.

On the contrary, mere deteriorations, or coarse, stridulent, and, in the

ordinary sense of the phrase, "broad" forms of utterance, are not

dialects at all, having nothing dialectic in them; and all phrases

developed in states of rude employment, and restricted intercourse, are

injurious to the tone and narrowing to the power of the language they

affect. Mere breadth of accent does not spoil a dialect as long as the

speakers are men of varied idea and good intelligence; but the moment

the life is contracted by mining, millwork, or any oppressive and

monotonous labor, the accents and phrases become debased. It is part of

the popular folly of the day to find pleasure in trying to write and

spell these abortive, crippled, and more or less brutal forms of human

speech.

29. Abortive, crippled, or brutal, are however not necessarily

"corrupted" dialects. Corrupt language is that gathered by ignorance,

invented by vice, misused by insensibility, or minced and mouthed by

affectation, especially in the attempt to deal with words of which only

half the meaning is understood or half the sound heard. Mrs. Gamp's

"aperiently so"--and the "underminded" with primal sense of undermine,

of--I forget which gossip, in the "Mill on the Floss," are master-and

mistress-pieces in this latter kind. Mrs. Malaprop's "allegories on the

banks of the Nile" are in somewhat higher order of mistake: Mrs. Tabitha

Bramble's ignorance is vulgarized by her selfishness, and Winifred

Jenkins' by her conceit. The "wot" of Noah Claypole, and the other

degradations of cockneyism (Sam Weller and his father are in nothing

more admirable than in the power of heart and sense that can purify even

these); the "trewth" of Mr. Chadband, and "natur" of Mr. Squeers, are

examples of the corruption of words by insensibility: the use of the

word "bloody" in modern low English is a deeper corruption, not altering

the form of the word, but defiling the thought in it.

Thus much being understood, I shall proceed to examine thoroughly a

fragment of Scott's Lowland Scottish dialect; not choosing it of the

most beautiful kind; on the contrary, it shall be a piece reaching as

low down as he ever allows Scotch to go--it is perhaps the only unfair

patriotism in him, that if ever he wants a word or two of really

villainous slang, he gives it in English or Dutch--not Scotch.

I had intended in the close of this paper to analyze and compare the

characters of Andrew Fairservice and Richie Moniplies, for examples, the

former of innate evil, unaffected by external influences, and

undiseased, but distinct from natural goodness as a nettle is distinct

from balm or lavender; and the latter of innate goodness, contracted and

pinched by circumstance, but still undiseased, as an oak-leaf crisped by

frost, not by the worm. This, with much else in my mind, I must put off;

but the careful study of one sentence of Andrew's will give us a good

deal to think of.

30. I take his account of the rescue of Glasgow Cathedral at the time of

the Reformation.

Ah! it's a brave kirk--nane o' yere whigmaleeries an curliewurlies

and opensteek hems about it--a' solid, weel-jointed mason-wark,

that will stand as lang as the warld, keep hands and gunpowther aff

it. It had amaist a douncome lang syne at the Reformation, when

they pu'd doun the kirks of St. Andrews and Perth, and thereawa',

to cleanse them o' Papery, and idolatry, and image-worship, and

surplices, and sic-like rags o' the muckle hure that sitteth on

seven hills, as if ane wasna braid eneugh for her auld hinder end.

Sae the commons o' Renfrew, and o' the Barony, and the Gorbals, and

a' about, they behoved to come into Glasgow ae fair morning, to try

their hand on purging the High Kirk o' Popish nicknackets. But the

townsmen o' Glasgow, they were feared their auld edifice might slip

the girths in gaun through siccan rough physic, sae they rang the

common bell, and assembled the train-bands wi' took o' drum. By

good luck, the worthy James Rabat was Dean o' Guild that year--(and

a gude mason he was himsell, made him the keener to keep up the

auld bigging), and the trades assembled, and offered downright

battle to the commons, rather than their kirk should coup the

crans, as others had done elsewhere. It wasna for luve o'

Paperie--na, na!--nane could ever say that o' the trades o'

Glasgow--Sae they sune came to an agreement to take a' the

idolatrous statues of sants (sorrow be on them!) out o' their

neuks--And sae the bits o' stane idols were broken in pieces by

Scripture warrant, and flung into the Molendinar burn, and the auld

kirk stood as crouse as a cat when the flaes are kaimed aff her,

and a'body was alike pleased. And I hae heard wise folk say, that

if the same had been done in ilka kirk in Scotland, the Reform wad

just hae been as pure as it is e'en now, and we wad hae mair

Christianlike kirks; for I hae been sae lang in England, that

naething will drived out o' my head, that the dog-kennel at

Osbaldistone-Hall is better than mony a house o' God in Scotland.

31. Now this sentence is in the first place a piece of Scottish

history of quite inestimable and concentrated value. Andrew's temperament

is the type of a vast class of Scottish--shall we call it

"_sow_-thistlian"--mind, which necessarily takes the view of either Pope

or saint that the thistle in Lebanon took of the cedar or lilies in

Lebanon; and the entire force of the passions which, in the Scottish

revolution, foretold and forearmed the French one, is told in this one

paragraph; the coarseness of it, observe, being admitted, not for the

sake of the laugh, any more than an onion in broth merely for its

flavor, but for the meat of it; the inherent constancy of that

coarseness being a fact in this order of mind, and an essential part of

the history to be told.

Secondly, observe that this speech, in the religious passion of it, such

as there may be, is entirely sincere. Andrew is a thief, a liar, a

coward, and, in the Fair service from which he takes his name, a

hypocrite; but in the form of prejudice, which is all that his mind is

capable of in the place of religion, he is entirely sincere. He does not

in the least pretend detestation of image worship to please his master,

or anyone else; he honestly scorns the "carnal morality[58] as dowd and

fusionless as rue-leaves at Yule" of the sermon in the upper cathedral;

and when wrapt in critical attention to the "real savor o' doctrine" in

the crypt, so completely forgets the hypocrisy of his fair service as

to return his master's attempt to disturb him with hard punches of the

elbow.

Thirdly. He is a man of no mean sagacity, quite up to the average

standard of Scottish common sense, not a low one; and, though incapable

of understanding any manner of lofty thought or passion, is a shrewd

measurer of weaknesses, and not without a spark or two of kindly

feeling. See first his sketch of his master's character to Mr.

Hammorgaw, beginning: "He's no a'thegither sae void o' sense, neither";

and then the close of the dialogue: "But the lad's no a bad lad after

a', and he needs some careful body to look after him."

Fourthly. He is a good workman; knows his own business well, and can

judge of other craft, if sound, or otherwise.

All these four qualities of him must be known before we can understand

this single speech. Keeping them in mind, I take it up, word by word.

32. You observe, in the outset, Scott makes no attempt whatever to

indicate accents or modes of pronunciation by changed spelling, unless

the word becomes a quite definitely new, and securely writable one. The

Scottish way of pronouncing "James," for instance, is entirely peculiar,

and extremely pleasant to the ear. But it is so, just because it does

_not_ change the word into Jeems, nor into Jims, nor into Jawms. A

modern writer of dialects would think it amusing to use one or other of

these ugly spellings. But Scott writes the name in pure English, knowing

that a Scots reader will speak it rightly, and an English one be wise in

letting it alone. On the other hand he writes "weel" for "well," because

that word is complete in its change, and may be very closely expressed

by the double _e_. The ambiguous _u_'s in "gude" and "sune" are

admitted, because far liker the sound than the double _o_ would be, and

that in "hure," for grace' sake, to soften the word; so also "flaes" for

"fleas." "Mony" for "many" is again positively right in sound, and

"neuk" differs from our "nook" in sense, and is not the same word at

all, as we shall presently see.

Secondly, observe, not a word is corrupted in any indecent haste,

slowness, slovenliness, or incapacity of pronunciation. There is no

lisping, drawling, slobbering, or snuffling: the speech is as clear as a

bell and as keen as an arrow: and its elisions and contractions are

either melodious, ("na," for "not,"--"pu'd," for "pulled,") or as normal

as in a Latin verse. The long words are delivered without the slightest

bungling; and "bigging" finished to its last _g_.

33. I take the important words now in their places.

_Brave._ The old English sense of the word in "to go brave," retained,

expressing Andrew's sincere and respectful admiration. Had he meant to

insinuate a hint of the church's being too fine, he would have said

"braw."

_Kirk._ This is of course just as pure and unprovincial a word as

"Kirche," or "église."

_Whigmaleerie._ I cannot get at the root of this word, but it is one

showing that the speaker is not bound by classic rules, but will use any

syllables that will enrich his meaning. "Nipperty-tipperty" (of his

master's "poetry-nonsense") is another word of the same class.

"Curliewurlie" is of course just as pure as Shakespeare's "Hurlyburly."

But see first suggestion of the idea to Scott at Blair-Adam (L. vi.

264).

_Opensteek hems._ More description, or better, of the later Gothic

cannot be put into four syllables. "Steek," melodious for stitch, has a

combined sense of closing or fastening. And note that the later Gothic

being precisely what Scott knew best (in Melrose) and liked best, it is,

here as elsewhere, quite as much himself[59] as Frank, that he is

laughing at, when he laughs _with_ Andrew, whose "opensteek hems" are

only a ruder metaphor for his own "willow-wreaths changed to stone."

_Gunpowther._ "-Ther" is a lingering vestige of the French "-dre."

_Syne._ One of the melodious and mysterious Scottish words which have

partly the sound of wind and stream in them, and partly the range of

softened idea which is like a distance of blue hills over border land

("far in the distant Cheviot's blue"). Perhaps even the least

sympathetic "Englisher" might recognize this, if he heard "Old Long

Since" vocally substituted for the Scottish words to the air. I do not

know the root; but the word's proper meaning is not "since," but before

or after an interval of some duration, "as weel sune as syne." "But

first on Sawnie gies a ca', Syne, bauldly in she enters."

_Behoved_ (_to come_). A rich word, with peculiar idiom, always used

more or less ironically of anything done under a partly mistaken and

partly pretended notion of duty.

_Siccan._ Far prettier, and fuller in meaning than "such." It contains

an added sense of wonder; and means properly "so great" or "so unusual."

_Took_ (_o' drum_). Classical "tuck" from Italian "toccata," the

preluding "touch" or flourish, on any instrument (but see Johnson under

word "tucket," quoting "Othello"). The deeper Scottish vowels are used

here to mark the deeper sound of the bass drum, as in more solemn

warning.

_Bigging._ The only word in all the sentence of which the Scottish form

is less melodious than the English, "and what for no," seeing that

Scottish architecture is mostly little beyond Bessie Bell's and Mary

Gray's? "They biggit a bow're by yon burnside, and theekit it ow're wi'

rashes." But it is pure Anglo-Saxon in roots; see glossary to

Fairbairn's edition of the Douglas "Virgil," 1710.

_Coup._ Another of the much-embracing words; short for "upset," but with

a sense of awkwardness as the inherent cause of fall; compare Richie

Moniplies (also for sense of "behoved"): "Ae auld hirplin deevil of a

potter behoved just to step in my way, and offer me a pig (earthen

pot--etym. dub.), as he said 'just to put my Scotch ointment in'; and I

gave him a push, as but natural, and the tottering deevil coupit owre

amang his own pigs, and damaged a score of them." So also Dandie Dinmont

in the postchaise: "'Od! I hope they'll no coup us."

_The Crans._ Idiomatic; root unknown to me, but it means in this use,

fall total, and without recovery.[60]

_Molendinar._ From "molendinum," the grinding-place. I do not know if

actually the local name,[61] or Scott's invention. Compare Sir Piercie's

"Molinaras." But at all events used here with by-sense of degradation of

the formerly idle saints to grind at the mill.

_Crouse._ Courageous, softened with a sense of comfort.

_Ilka._ Again a word with azure distance, including the whole sense of

"each" and "every." The reader must carefully and reverently distinguish

these comprehensive words, which gather two or more perfectly understood

meanings into one _chord_ of meaning, and are harmonies more than words,

from the above-noted blunders between two half-hit meanings, struck as a

bad piano-player strikes the edge of another note. In English we have

fewer of these combined thoughts; so that Shakespeare rather plays with

the distinct lights of his words, than melts them into one. So again

Bishop Douglas spells, and doubtless spoke, the word "rose,"

differently, according to his purpose; if as the chief or governing

ruler of flowers, "rois," but if only in her own beauty, rose.

_Christianlike._ The sense of the decency and order proper to

Christianity is stronger in Scotland than in any other country, and the

word "Christian" more distinctly opposed to "beast." Hence the

back-handed cut at the English for their over-pious care of dogs.

34. I am a little surprised myself at the length to which this

examination of one small piece of Sir Walter's first-rate work has

carried us, but here I must end for this time, trusting, if the Editor

of the _Nineteenth Century_ permit me, yet to trespass, perhaps more

than once, on his readers' patience; but, at all events, to examine in a

following paper the technical characteristics of Scott's own style, both

in prose and verse, together with Byron's, as opposed to our fashionably

recent dialects and rhythms; the essential virtues of language, in both

the masters of the old school, hinging ultimately, little as it might be

thought, on certain unalterable views of theirs concerning the code

called "of the Ten Commandments," wholly at variance with the dogmas of

automatic morality which, summed again by the witches' line, "Fair is

foul, and foul is fair," hover through the fog and filthy air of our

prosperous England.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 37: _Nineteenth Century_, June, 1880.]

[Footnote 38: See _Time and Tide_, § 72.--ED.]

[Footnote 39: Nell, in the "Old Curiosity Shop," was simply killed for

the market, as a butcher kills a lamb (see Forster's "Life,") and Paul

was written under the same conditions of illness which affected Scott--a

part of the ominous palsies, grasping alike author and subject both in

"Dombey" and "Little Dorrit."]

[Footnote 40: "Chourineur" not striking with dagger-point, but ripping

with knife-edge. Yet I do him, and La Louve, injustice in classing them

with the two others; they are put together only as parts in the same

phantasm. Compare with La Louve, the strength of wild virtue in the

"Louvécienne" (Lucienne) of Gaboriau--she, province-born and bred; and

opposed to Parisian civilization in the character of her seamstress

friend. "De ce Paris, où elle était née, elle savait tout--elle

connaissait tout. Rien ne l'étonnait, nul ne l'intimidait. Sa science

des détails matériels de l'existence était inconcevable. Impossible de

la duper!--Eh bien! cette fille si laborieuse et si économe n'avait même

pas la plus vague notion des sentiments qui sont l'honneur de la femme.

Je n'avais pas idée d'une si complète absence de sens moral; d'une si

inconscience dépravation, d'une impudence si effrontément

naïve."--"L'Argent des autres," vol. i. p. 358.]

[Footnote 41: The reader who cares to seek it may easily find medical

evidence of the physical effects of certain states of brain disease in

producing especially images of truncated and Hermes-like deformity,

complicated with grossness. Horace, in the "Epodes," scoffs at it, but

not without horror. Luca Signorelli and Raphael in their arabesques are

deeply struck by it: Dürer, defying and playing with it alternately, is

almost beaten down again and again in the distorted faces, hewing

halberts, and suspended satyrs of his arabesques round the polyglot

Lord's Prayer; it takes entire possession of Balzac in the "Contes

Drolatiques"; it struck Scott in the earliest days of his childish

"visions" intensified by the ax-stroke murder of his grand aunt (L. i.

142, and see close of this note). It chose for him the subject of the

"Heart of Midlothian," and produced afterwards all the recurrent ideas

of executions, tainting "Nigel," almost spoiling "Quentin

Durward"--utterly the "Fair Maid of Perth": and culminating in "Bizarro"

(L. x. 149). It suggested all the deaths by falling, or sinking, as in

delirious sleep--Kennedy, Eveline Neville (nearly repeated in Clara

Mowbray), Amy Robsart, the Master of Ravenswood in the quicksand,

Morris, and Corporal Grace-be-here--compare the dream of Gride, in

"Nicholas Nickleby," and Dickens's own last words, _on the ground_ (so

also, in my own inflammation of the brain, two years ago, I dreamed that

I fell through the earth and came out on the other side). In its

grotesque and distorting power, it produced all the figures of the Lay

Goblin, Pacolet, Flibbertigibbet, Cockledemoy, Geoffrey Hudson, Fenella,

and Nectabanus; in Dickens it in like manner gives Quilp, Krook, Smike,

Smallweed, Miss Mowcher, and the dwarfs and wax-work of Nell's caravan;

and runs entirely wild in "Barnaby Budge," where, with a corps de drame

composed of one idiot, two madmen, a gentleman-fool who is also a

villain, a shop-boy fool who is also a blackguard, a hangman, a

shriveled virago, and a doll in ribbons--carrying this company through

riot and fire, till he hangs the hangman, one of the madmen, his mother,

and the idiot, runs the gentleman-fool through in a bloody duel, and

burns and crushes the shop-boy fool into shapelessness, he cannot yet be

content without shooting the spare lover's leg off, and marrying him to

the doll in a wooden one; the shapeless shop-boy being finally also

married in _two_ wooden ones. It is this mutilation, observe, which is

the very sign manual of the plague; joined, in the artistic forms of it,

with a love of thorniness--(in their mystic root, the truncation of the

limbless serpent and the spines of the dragon's wing. Compare "Modern

Painters," vol. iv., "Chapter on the Mountain Gloom," s. 19); and in

_all_ forms of it, with petrifaction or loss of power by cold in the

blood, whence the last Darwinian process of the witches' charm--"cool it

with a baboon's _blood, then_ the charm is firm and good." The two

frescoes in the colossal handbills which have lately decorated the

streets of London (the baboon with the mirror, and the Maskelyne and

Cooke decapitation) are the final English forms of Raphael's arabesque

under this influence; and it is well worth while to get the number for

the week ending April 3, 1880, of "Young Folks--a magazine of

instructive and entertaining literature for boys and girls of all ages,"

containing "A Sequel to Desdichado" (the modern development of Ivanhoe),

in which a quite monumental example of the kind of art in question will

be found as a leading illustration of this characteristic sentence,

"See, good Cerberus," said Sir Rupert, "_my hand has been struck off.

You must make me a hand of iron, one with springs in it, so that I can

make it grasp a dagger_." The text is also, as it professes to be,

instructive; being the ultimate degeneration of what I have above called

the "folly" of "Ivanhoe"; for the folly begets folly down, and down; and

whatever Scott and Turner did wrong has thousands of imitators--their

wisdom none will so much as hear, how much less follow!

In both of the Masters, it is always to be remembered that the evil and

good are alike conditions of literal _vision_: and therefore also,

inseparably connected with the state of the health. I believe the first

elements of all Scott's errors were in the milk of his consumptive

nurse, which all but killed him as an infant (L. i. 19)--and was without

doubt the cause of the teething fever that ended in his lameness (L. i.

20). Then came (if the reader cares to know what I mean by "Fors," let

him read the page carefully) the fearful accidents to his only sister,

and her death (L. i. 17); then the madness of his nurse, who planned his

own murder (21), then the stories continually told him of the executions

at Carlisle (24), his aunt's husband having seen them; issuing, he

himself scarcely knows how, in the unaccountable terror that came upon

him at the sight of statuary (31)--especially Jacob's ladder; then the

murder of Mrs. Swinton, and finally the nearly fatal bursting of the

blood vessel at Kelso, with the succeeding nervous illness

(65-67)--solaced, while he was being "bled and blistered till he had

scarcely a pulse left," by that history of the Knights of Malta--fondly

dwelt on and realized by actual modeling of their fortress, which

returned to his mind for the theme of its last effort in passing away.]

[Footnote 42: "Se dit par dénigrement, d'un chrétien qui ne croit pas

les dogmes de sa religion."--Fleming, vol. ii. p. 659.]

[Footnote 43: The novel alluded to is "The Mill on the Floss." See

below, p. 272, § 108.--ED.]

[Footnote 44: "A son nom," properly. The sentence is one of Victor

Cherbuliez's, in "Prosper Randoce," which is full of other valuable

ones. See the old nurse's "ici bas les choses vont de travers, comme un

chien qui va à vêpres," p. 93; and compare Prosper's treasures, "la

petite Vénus, et le petit Christ d'ivoire," p. 121; also Madame

Brehanne's request for the divertissement of "quelque belle batterie à

coups de couteau" with Didier's answer. "Hélas! madame, vous jouez de

malheur, ici dans la Drôme, l'on se massacre aussi peu que possible," p.

33.]

[Footnote 45: Edgeworth's "Tales," (Hunter, 1827), "Harrington and

Ormond," vol. iii. p. 260.]

[Footnote 46: Alice of Salisbury, Alice Lee, Alice Bridgnorth.]

[Footnote 47: Scott's father was habitually ascetic. "I have heard his

son tell that it was common with him, if any one observed that the soup

was good, to taste it again, and say, 'Yes--it is too good, bairns,' and

dash a tumbler of cold water into his plate."--Lockhart's "Life" (Black,

Edinburgh, 1869), vol. i. p. 312. In other places I refer to this book

in the simple form of "L."]

[Footnote 48: A young lady sang to me, just before I copied out this

page for press, a Miss Somebody's "great song," "Live, and Love, and

Die." Had it been written for nothing better than silkworms, it should

at least have added--Spin.]

[Footnote 49: See passage of introduction to "Ivanhoe," wisely quoted in

L. vi. 106.]

[Footnote 50: See below, note, p. 199, on the conclusion of

"Woodstock."]

[Footnote 51: The reference is to a series of "Waverley Tableaux" given

in London shortly before the publication of this paper.--ED.]

[Footnote 52: L. iv. 177.]

[Footnote 53: L. vi. 67.]

[Footnote 54: "One other such novel, and there's an end; but who can

last forever? who ever lasted so long?"--Sydney Smith (of the _Pirate_)

to Jeffrey, December 30, 1821. (_Letters_, vol. ii. p. 223.)]

[Footnote 55: L. vi. p. 188. Compare the description of Fairy Dean, vii.

192.]

[Footnote 56: All, alas! were now in a great measure so written.

"Ivanhoe," "The Monastery," "The Abbot," and "Kenilworth" were all

published between December 1819 and January 1821, Constable & Co. giving

five thousand guineas for the remaining copyright of them, Scott

clearing ten thousand before the bargain was completed; and before the

"Fortunes of Nigel" issued from the press Scott had exchanged

instruments and received his bookseller's bills for no less than four

"works of fiction," not one of them otherwise described in the deeds of

agreement, to be produced in unbroken succession, _each of them to fill

up at least three volumes, but with proper saving clauses as to increase

of copy money in case any of them should run to four_; and within two

years all this anticipation had been wiped off by "Peveril of the Peak,"

"Quentin Durward," "St. Ronan's Well," and "Redgauntlet."]

[Footnote 57: "Woodstock" was finished 26th March, 1826. He knew then of

his ruin; and wrote in bitterness, but not in weakness. The closing

pages are the most beautiful of the book. But a month afterwards Lady

Scott died; and he never wrote glad word more.]

[Footnote 58: Compare Mr. Spurgeon's not unfrequent orations on the same

subject.]

[Footnote 59: There are three definite and intentional portraits of

himself, in the novels, each giving a separate part of himself: Mr.

Oldbuck, Frank Osbaldistone, and Alan Fairford.]

[Footnote 60: See note, p. 224.--ED.]

[Footnote 61: Andrew knows Latin, and might have coined the word in his

conceit; but, writing to a kind friend in Glasgow, I find the brook was

called "Molyndona" even before the building of the Subdean Mill in 1446.

See also account of the locality in Mr. George's admirable volume, "Old

Glasgow," pp. 129, 149, etc. The Protestantism of Glasgow, since

throwing that powder of saints into her brook Kidron, has presented it

with other pious offerings; and my friend goes on to say that the brook,

once famed for the purity of its waters (much used for bleaching), "has

for nearly a hundred years been a crawling stream of loathsomeness. It

is now bricked over, and a carriage-way made on the top of it;

underneath the foul mess still passes through the heart of the city,

till it falls into the Clyde close to the harbor."]

FICTION, FAIR AND FOUL.[62]

II.

35. _"He hated greetings in the market-place_, and there were generally

loiterers in the streets to persecute him _either about the events of

the day_, or about some petty pieces of business."

These lines, which the reader will find near the beginning of the

sixteenth chapter of the first volume of the "Antiquary," contain two

indications of the old man's character, which, receiving the ideal of

him as a portrait of Scott himself, are of extreme interest to me. They

mean essentially that neither Monkbarns nor Scott had any mind to be

called of men, Rabbi, in mere hearing of the mob; and especially that

they hated to be drawn back out of their far-away thoughts, or forward

out of their long-ago thoughts, by any manner of "daily" news, whether

printed or gabbled. Of which two vital characteristics, deeper in both

men, (for I must always speak of Scott's creations as if they were as

real as himself,) than any of their superficial vanities, or passing

enthusiasms, I have to speak more at another time. I quote the passage

just now, because there was one piece of the daily news of the year 1815

which did extremely interest Scott, and materially direct the labor of

the latter part of his life; nor is there any piece of history in this

whole nineteenth century quite so pregnant with various instruction as

the study of the reasons which influenced Scott and Byron in their

opposite views of the glories of the battle of Waterloo.

36. But I quote it for another reason also. The principal greeting which

Mr. Oldbuck on this occasion receives in the market-place, being

compared with the speech of Andrew Fairservice, examined in my first

paper, will furnish me with the text of what I have mainly to say in the

present one.

"'Mr. Oldbuck,' said the town-clerk (a more important person, who

came in front and ventured to stop the old gentleman), 'the

provost, understanding you were in town, begs on no account that

you'll quit it without seeing him; he wants to speak to ye about

bringing the water frae the Fairwell spring through a part o' your

lands.'

"'What the deuce!--have they nobody's land but mine to cut and

carve on?--I won't consent, tell them.'

"'And the provost,' said the clerk, going on, without noticing the

rebuff, 'and the council, wad be agreeable that you should hae the

auld stanes at Donagild's Chapel, that ye was wussing to hae.'

"'Eh?--what?--Oho! that's another story--Well, well, I'll call upon

the provost, and we'll talk about it.'

"'But ye maun speak your mind on't forthwith, Monkbarns, if ye want

the stanes; for Deacon Harlewalls thinks the carved through-stanes

might be put with advantage on the front of the new council

house--that is, the twa cross-legged figures that the callants used

to ca' Robbin and Bobbin, ane on ilka door-cheek; and the other

stane, that they ca'd Ailie Dailie, abune the door. It will be very

tastefu', the Deacon says, and just in the style of modern Gothic.'

"'Good Lord deliver me from this Gothic generation!' exclaimed the

Antiquary,--'a monument of a knight-templar on each side of a

Grecian porch, and a Madonna on the top of it!--_O crimini!_--Well,

tell the provost I wish to have the stones, and we'll not differ

about the water-course.--It's lucky I happened to come this way

to-day.'

"They parted mutually satisfied; but the wily clerk had most reason

to exult in the dexterity he had displayed, since the whole

proposal of an exchange between the monuments (which the council

had determined to remove as a nuisance, because they encroached

three feet upon the public road) and the privilege of conveying the

water to the burgh, through the estate of Monkbarns, was an idea

which had originated with himself upon the pressure of the moment."

37. In this single page of Scott, will the reader please note the kind

of prophetic instinct with which the great men of every age mark and

forecast its destinies? The water from the Fairwell is the future

Thirlmere carried to Manchester; the "auld stanes"[63] at Donagild's

Chapel, removed as a _nuisance_, foretell the necessary view taken by

modern cockneyism, Liberalism, and progress, of all things that remind

them of the noble dead, of their fathers' fame, or of their own duty;

and the public road becomes their idol, instead of the saint's shrine.

Finally, the roguery of the entire transaction--the mean man seeing the

weakness of the honorable, and "besting" him--in modern slang, in the

manner and at the pace of modern trade--"on the pressure of the moment."

But neither are these things what I have at present quoted the passage

for.

I quote it, that we may consider how much wonderful and various history

is gathered in the fact recorded for us in this piece of entirely fair

fiction, that in the Scottish borough of Fairport (Montrose, really), in

the year 17--of Christ, the knowledge given by the pastors and teachers

provided for its children by enlightened Scottish Protestantism, of

their fathers' history, and the origin of their religion, had resulted

in this substance and sum;--that the statues of two crusading knights

had become, to their children, Bobbin and Bobbin; and the statue of the

Madonna, Ailie Dailie.

A marvelous piece of history, truly: and far too comprehensive for

general comment here. Only one small piece of it I must carry forward

the readers' thoughts upon.

38. The pastors and teachers aforesaid, (represented typically in

another part of this errorless book by Mr. Blattergowl,) are not,

whatever else they may have to answer for, answerable for these names.

The names are of the children's own choosing and bestowing, but not of

the children's own inventing. "Robin" is a classically endearing

cognomen, recording the _errant_ heroism of old days--the name of the

Bruce and of Rob Roy. "Bobbin" is a poetical and symmetrical fulfillment

and adornment of the original phrase. "Ailie" is the last echo of "Ave,"

changed into the softest Scottish Christian name familiar to the

children, itself the beautiful feminine form of royal "Louis"; the

"Dailie" again symmetrically added for kinder and more musical

endearment. The last vestiges, you see, of honor for the heroism and

religion of their ancestors, lingering on the lips of babes and

sucklings.

But what is the meaning of this necessity the children find themselves

under of completing the nomenclature rhythmically and rhymingly? Note

first the difference carefully, and the attainment of both qualities by

the couplets in question. Rhythm is the syllabic and quantitative

measure of the words, in which Robin both in weight and time, balances

Bobbin; and Dailie holds level scale with Ailie. But rhyme is the added

correspondence of sound; unknown and undesired, so far as we can learn,

by the Greek Orpheus, but absolutely essential to, and, as special

virtue, becoming titular of, the Scottish Thomas.

39. The "Ryme,"[64] you may at first fancy, is the especially childish

part of the work. Not so. It is the especially chivalric and Christian

part of it. It characterizes the Christian chant or canticle, as a

higher thing than a Greek ode, melos, or hymnos, or than a Latin carmen.

Think of it; for this again is wonderful! That these children of

Montrose should have an element of music in their souls which Homer had

not,--which a melos of David the Prophet and King had not,--which

Orpheus and Amphion had not,--which Apollo's unrymed oracles became mute

at the sound of.

A strange new equity this,--melodious justice and judgment, as it

were,--in all words spoken solemnly and ritualistically by Christian

human creatures;--Robin and Bobbin--by the Crusader's tomb, up to "Dies

iræ, dies illa," at judgment of the crusading soul.

You have to understand this most deeply of all Christian minstrels, from

first to last; that they are more musical, because more joyful, than any

others on earth: ethereal minstrels, pilgrims of the sky, true to the

kindred points of heaven and home; their joy essentially the sky-lark's,

in light, in purity; but, with their human eyes, looking for the

glorious appearing of something in the sky, which the bird cannot.

This it is that changes Etruscan murmur into Terza rima--Horatian Latin

into Provençal troubadour's melody; not, because less artful, less wise.

40. Here is a little bit, for instance, of French ryming just before

Chaucer's time--near enough to our own French to be intelligible to us

yet.

"O quant très-glorieuse vie,

Quant cil qui tout peut et maistrie,

Veult esprouver pour nécessaire,

Ne pour quant il ne blasma mie

La vie de Marthe sa mie:

Mais il lui donna exemplaire

D'autrement vivre, et de bien plaire

A Dieu; et plut de bien à faire:

Pour se conclut-il que Marie

Qui estoit à ses piedz sans braire,

Et pensoit d'entendre et de taire,

Estleut la plus saine partie.

La meilleur partie esleut-elle

Et la plus saine et la plus belle,

Qui jà ne luy sera ostée

Car par vérité se fut celle

Qui fut tousjours fresche et nouvelle,

D'aymer Dieu et d'en estre aymée;

Car jusqu'au cueur fut entamée,

Et si ardamment enflamée,

Que tousjours ardoit I'estincelle;

Par quoi elle fut visitée

Et de Dieu premier confortée;

Car charité est trop ysnelle."

41. The only law of _meter_, observed in this song, is that each line

shall be octosyllabic:

Qui fut | tousjours | fresche et | nouvelle,

D'autre | ment vi | vret de | bien (ben) plaire

Et pen | soit den | tendret | de taire.

But the reader must note that words which were two-syllabled in Latin

mostly remain yet so in the French.

La _vi_ | _e_ de | Marthe | sa mie,

although _mie_, which is pet language, loving abbreviation of _amica_

through _amie_, remains monosyllabic. But _vie_ elides its _e_ before a

vowel:

Car Mar- | the me | nait vie | active

Et Ma- | ri-e | contemp | lative;

and custom endures many exceptions. Thus _Marie_ may be three-syllabled,

as above, or answer to _mie_ as a dissyllable; but _vierge_ is always, I

think, dissyllabic, _vier-ge_, with even stronger accent on the _-ge_,

for the Latin _-go_.

Then, secondly, of quantity, there is scarcely any fixed law. The meters

may be timed as the minstrel chooses--fast or slow--and the iambic

current checked in reverted eddy, as the words chance to come.

But, thirdly, there is to be rich ryming and chiming, no matter how

simply got, so only that the words jingle and tingle together with due

art of interlacing and answering in different parts of the stanza,

correspondent to the involutions of tracery and illumination. The whole

twelve-line stanza is thus constructed with two rymes only, six of each,

thus arranged:

A A B | A A B | B B A | B B A |

dividing the verse thus into four measures, reversed in ascent and

descent, or _descant_ more properly; and doubtless with correspondent

phases in the voice-given, and duly accompanying, or following, music;

Thomas the Rymer's own precept, that "tong is chefe in mynstrelsye,"

being always kept faithfully in mind.[65]

42. Here then you have a sufficient example of the pure chant of the

Christian ages; which is always at heart joyful, and divides itself into

the four great forms; Song of Praise, Song of Prayer, Song of Love, and

Song of Battle; praise, however, being the keynote of passion through

all the four forms; according to the first law which I have already

given in the "Laws of Fésole"; "all great Art is Praise," of which the

contrary is also true, all foul or miscreant Art is accusation, [Greek:

diabolê]: "She gave me of the tree and I did eat" being an entirely

museless expression on Adam's part, the briefly essential contrary of

Love-song.

With these four perfect forms of Christian chant, of which we may take

for pure examples the "Te Deum," the "Te Lucis Ante," the "Amor che

nella mente,"[66] and the "Chant de Roland," are mingled songs of

mourning, of Pagan origin (whether Greek or Danish), holding grasp still

of the races that have once learned them, in times of suffering and

sorrow; and songs of Christian humiliation or grief, regarding chiefly

the sufferings of Christ, or the conditions of our own sin: while

through the entire system of these musical complaints are interwoven

moralities, instructions, and related histories, in illustration of

both, passing into Epic and Romantic verse, which gradually, as the

forms and learnings of society increase, becomes less joyful, and more

didactic, or satiric, until the last echoes of Christian joy and melody

vanish in the "Vanity of human wishes."

43. And here I must pause for a minute or two to separate the different

branches of our inquiry clearly from one another. For one thing, the

reader must please put for the present out of his head all thought of

the progress of "civilization"--that is to say, broadly, of the

substitution of wigs for hair, gas for candles, and steam for legs. This

is an entirely distinct matter from the phases of policy and religion.

It has nothing to do with the British Constitution, or the French

Revolution, or the unification of Italy. There are, indeed, certain

subtle relations between the state of mind, for instance, in Venice,

which makes her prefer a steamer to a gondola, and that which makes her

prefer a gazetteer to a duke; but these relations are not at all to be

dealt with until we solemnly understand that whether men shall be

Christians and poets, or infidels and dunces, does not depend on the way

they cut their hair, tie their breeches, or light their fires. Dr.

Johnson might have worn his wig in fullness conforming to his dignity,

without therefore coming to the conclusion that human wishes were vain;

nor is Queen Antoinette's civilized hair-powder, as opposed to Queen

Bertha's savagely loose hair, the cause of Antoinette's laying her head

at last in scaffold dust, but Bertha in a pilgrim-haunted tomb.

44. Again, I have just now used the words "poet" and "dunce," meaning

the degree of each quality possible to average human nature. Men are

eternally divided into the two classes of poet (believer, maker, and

praiser) and dunce (or unbeliever, unmaker, and dispraiser). And in

process of ages they have the power of making faithful and formative

creatures of themselves, or unfaithful and _de_-formative. And this

distinction between the creatures who, blessing, are blessed, and

evermore _benedicti_, and the creatures who, cursing, are cursed, and

evermore maledicti, is one going through all humanity; antediluvian in

Cain and Abel, diluvian in Ham and Shem. And the question for the public

of any given period is not whether they are a constitutional or

unconstitutional vulgus, but whether they are a benignant or malignant

vulgus. So also, whether it is indeed the gods who have given any

gentleman the grace to despise the rabble, depends wholly on whether it

is indeed the rabble, or he, who are the malignant persons.

45. But yet again. This difference between the persons to whom Heaven,

according to Orpheus, has granted "the hour of delight,"[67] and those

whom it has condemned to the hour of detestableness, being, as I have

just said, of all times and nations,--it is an interior and more

delicate difference which we are examining in the gift of _Christian_ as

distinguished from unchristian, song. Orpheus, Pindar, and Horace are

indeed distinct from the prosaic rabble, as the bird from the snake; but

between Orpheus and Palestrina, Horace and Sidney, there is another

division, and a new power of music and song given to the humanity which

has hope of the Resurrection.

_This_ is the root of all life and all rightness in Christian harmony,

whether of word or instrument; and so literally, that in precise manner

as this hope disappears, the power of song is taken away, and taken away

utterly. "When the Christian falls back out of the bright hope of the

Resurrection, even the Orpheus song is forbidden him. Not to have known

the hope is blameless: one may sing, unknowing, as the swan, or

Philomela. But to have known and fall away from it, and to declare that

the human wishes, which are summed in that one--"Thy kingdom come"--are

vain! The Fates ordain there shall be no singing after that denial.

46. For observe this, and earnestly. The old Orphic song, with its dim

hope of yet once more Eurydice,--the Philomela song--granted after the

cruel silence,--the Halcyon song--with its fifteen days of peace, were

all sad, or joyful only in some vague vision of conquest over death. But

the Johnsonian vanity of wishes is on the whole satisfactory to

Johnson--accepted with gentlemanly resignation by Pope--triumphantly and

with bray of penny trumpets and blowing of steam-whistles, proclaimed

for the glorious discovery of the civilized ages, by Mrs. Barbauld, Miss

Edgeworth, Adam Smith, and Co. There is no God, but have we not invented

gunpowder?--who wants a God, with that in his pocket?[68] There is no

Resurrection, neither angel nor spirit; but have we not paper and pens,

and cannot every blockhead print his opinions, and the Day of Judgment

become Republican, with everybody for a judge, and the flat of the

universe for the throne? There is no law, but only gravitation and

congelation, and we are stuck together in an everlasting hail, and

melted together in everlasting mud, and great was the day in which our

worships were born. And there is no gospel, but only, whatever we've

got, to get more, and, wherever we are, to go somewhere else. And are

not these discoveries, to be sung of, and drummed of, and fiddled of,

and generally made melodiously indubitable in the eighteenth century

song of praise?

47. The Fates will not have it so. No word of song is possible, in that

century, to mortal lips. Only polished versification, sententious

pentameter and hexameter, until, having turned out its toes long enough

without dancing, and pattered with its lips long enough without piping,

suddenly Astræa returns to the earth, and a Day of Judgment of a sort,

and there bursts out a song at last again, a most curtly melodious

triplet of Amphisbænic ryme, "_Ça ira_."

Amphisbænic, fanged in each ryme with fire, and obeying Ercildoune's

precept, "Tong is chefe of mynstrelsye," to the syllable.--Don

Giovanni's hitherto fondly chanted "Andiam, andiam," become

suddenly impersonal and prophetic: IT shall go, and you also. A

cry--before it is a song, then song and accompaniment

together--perfectly done; and the march "towards the field of Mars. The

two hundred and fifty thousand--they to the sound of stringed

music--preceded by young girls with tricolor streamers, they have

shouldered soldierwise their shovels and picks, and with one throat are

singing _Ça ira_."[69]

Through all the springtime of 1790, from Brittany to Burgundy, on most

plains of France, under most city walls, there march and

constitutionally wheel to the Ça-iraing mood of fife and drum--our clear

glancing phalanxes;--the song of the two hundred and fifty thousand,

virgin-led, is in the long light of July. Nevertheless, another song is

yet needed, for phalanx, and for maid. For, two springs and summers

having gone--amphisbænic,--on the 28th of August, 1792, "Dumouriez rode

from the camp of Maulde, eastwards to _Sedan_."[70]

48. "And Longwi has fallen basely, and Brunswick and the Prussian king

will beleaguer Verdun, and Clairfait and the Austrians press deeper in

over the northern marches, Cimmerian Europe behind. And on that same

night Dumouriez assembles council of war at his lodgings in Sedan.

Prussians here, Austrians there, triumphant both. With broad highway to

Paris and little hindrance--_we_ scattered, helpless here and

there--what to advise?" The generals advise retreating, and retreating

till Paris be sacked at the latest day possible. Dumouriez, silent,

dismisses _them_,--keeps only, with a sign, Thouvenot. Silent thus, when

needful, yet having voice, it appears, of what musicians call tenor

quality, of a rare kind. Rubini-esque, even, but scarcely producible to

the fastidious ears at opera. The seizure of the forest of Argonne

follows--the cannonade of Valmy. The Prussians do not march on Paris

_this_ time, the autumnal hours of fate pass on--_ça ira_--and on the

6th of November, Dumouriez meets the Austrians also. "Dumouriez

wide-winged, they wide-winged--at and around Jemappes, its green heights

fringed and maned with red fire. And Dumouriez is swept back on this

wing and swept back on that, and is like to be swept back utterly, when

he rushes up in person, speaks a prompt word or two, and then, with

clear tenor-pipe, uplifts the hymn of the Marseillaise, ten thousand

tenor or bass pipes joining, or say some forty thousand in all, for

every heart leaps up at the sound; and so, with rhythmic march melody,

they rally, they advance, they rush death-defying, and like the fire

whirlwind sweep all manner of Austrians from the scene of action." Thus,

through the lips of Dumouriez, sings Tyrtæus, Rouget de Lisle.[71] "Aux

armes--marchons." Iambic measure with a witness! in what wide strophe

here beginning--in what unthought-of antistrophe returning to that

council chamber in Sedan!

49. While these two great songs were thus being composed, and sung, and

danced to in cometary cycle, by the French nation, here in our less

giddy island there rose, amidst hours of business in Scotland and of

idleness in England, three troubadours of quite different temper.

Different also themselves, but not opponent; forming a perfect chord,

and adverse all the three of them alike to the French musicians, in this

main point--that while the _Ca ira_ and Marseillaise were essentially

songs of blame and wrath, the British bards wrote, virtually, always

songs of praise, though by no means psalmody in the ancient keys. On the

contrary, all the three are alike moved by a singular antipathy to the

priests, and are pointed at with fear and indignation by the pietists,

of their day;--not without latent cause. For they are all of them, with

the most loving service, servants of that world which the Puritan and

monk alike despised; and, in the triple chord of their song, could not

but appear to the religious persons around them as respectively and

specifically the praisers--Scott of the world, Burns of the flesh, and

Byron of the devil.

To contend with this carnal orchestra, the religious world, having long

ago rejected its Catholic Psalms as antiquated and unscientific, and

finding its Puritan melodies sunk into faint jar and twangle from their

native trumpet-tone, had nothing to oppose but the innocent, rather than

religious, verses of the school recognized as that of the English Lakes;

very creditable to them; domestic at once and refined; observing the

errors of the world outside of the Lakes with a pitying and tender

indignation, and arriving in lacustrine seclusion at many valuable

principles of philosophy, as pure as the tarns of their mountains, and

of corresponding depth.[72]

50. I have lately seen, and with extreme pleasure, Mr. Matthew Arnold's

arrangement of Wordsworth's poems; and read with sincere interest his

high estimate of them. But a great poet's work never needs arrangement

by other hands; and though it is very proper that Silver How should

clearly understand and brightly praise its fraternal Rydal Mount, we

must not forget that, over yonder, are the Andes, all the while.

Wordsworth's rank and scale among poets were determined by himself, in a

single exclamation:

"What was the great Parnassus' self to thee,

Mount Skiddaw?"

Answer his question faithfully, and you have the relation between the

great masters of the Muse's teaching and the pleasant fingerer of his

pastoral flute among the reeds of Rydal.

Wordsworth is simply a Westmoreland peasant, with considerably less

shrewdness than most border Englishmen or Scotsmen inherit; and no sense

of humor: but gifted (in this singularly) with vivid sense of natural

beauty, and a pretty turn for reflections, not always acute, but, as far

as they reach, medicinal to the fever of the restless and corrupted life

around him. Water to parched lips may be better than Samian wine, but do

not let us therefore confuse the qualities of wine and water. I much

doubt there being many inglorious Miltons in our country churchyards;

but I am very sure there are many Wordsworths resting there, who were

inferior to the renowned one only in caring less to hear themselves

talk.

With an honest and kindly heart, a stimulating egoism, a wholesome

contentment in modest circumstances, and such sufficient ease, in that

accepted state, as permitted the passing of a good deal of time in

wishing that daisies could see the beauty of their own shadows, and

other such profitable mental exercises, Wordsworth has left us a series

of studies of the graceful and happy shepherd life of our lake country,

which to me personally, for one, are entirely sweet and precious; but

they are only so as the mirror of an existent reality in many ways more

beautiful than its picture.

51. But the other day I went for an afternoon's rest into the cottage of

one of our country people of old statesman class; cottage lying nearly

midway between two village churches, but more conveniently for downhill

walk towards one than the other. I found, as the good housewife made tea

for me, that nevertheless she went up the hill to church. "Why do not

you go to the nearer church?" I asked. "Don't you like the clergyman?"

"Oh no, sir," she answered, "it isn't that; but you know I couldn't

leave my mother." "Your mother! she is buried at H---- then?" "Yes, sir;

and you know I couldn't go to church anywhere else."

That feelings such as these existed among the peasants, not of

Cumberland only, but of all the tender earth that gives forth her fruit

for the living, and receives her dead to peace, might perhaps have been,

to our great and endless comfort, discovered before now, if Wordsworth

had been content to tell us what he knew of his own villages and people,

not as the leader of a new and only correct school of poetry, but simply

as a country gentleman of sense and feeling, fond of primroses, kind to

the parish children, and reverent of the spade with which Wilkinson had

tilled his lands: and I am by no means sure that his influence on the

stronger minds of his time was anywise hastened or extended by the

spirit of tunefulness under whose guidance he discovered that heaven

rymed to seven, and Foy to boy.

52. Tuneful nevertheless at heart, and of the heavenly choir, I gladly

and frankly acknowledge him; and our English literature enriched with a

new and a singular virtue in the aërial purity and healthful rightness

of his quiet song;--but _aërial_ only,--not ethereal; and lowly in its

privacy of light.

A measured mind, and calm; innocent, unrepentant; helpful to sinless

creatures and scathless, such of the flock as do not stray. Hopeful at

least, if not faithful; content with intimations of immortality such as

may be in skipping of lambs, and laughter of children--incurious to see

in the hands the print of the Nails.

A gracious and constant mind; as the herbage of its native hills,

fragrant and pure;--yet, to the sweep and the shadow, the stress and

distress, of the greater souls of men, as the tufted thyme to the

laurel wilderness of Tempe,--as the gleaming euphrasy to the dark

branches of Dodona.

[I am obliged to defer the main body of this paper to next

month,--revises penetrating all too late into my lacustrine

seclusion; as chanced also unluckily with the preceding paper, in

which the reader will perhaps kindly correct the consequent

misprints [now corrected, ED.], p. 203, l. 23, of

"scarcely" to "securely," and p. 206, l. 6, "full," with comma to

"fall," without one; noticing besides that "Redgauntlet" has been

omitted in the list, pp. 198, 199; and that the reference to note

should not be at the word "imagination," p. 198, l. 6, but at the

word "trade," l. 15. My dear old friend, Dr. John Brown, sends me,

from Jamieson's _Dictionary_, the following satisfactory end to one

of my difficulties:--"Coup the crans." The language is borrowed

from the "cran," or trivet on which small pots are placed in

cookery, which is sometimes turned with its feet uppermost by an

awkward assistant. Thus it signifies to be _completely_ upset.]

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 62: August, 1880.]

[Footnote 63: The following fragments out of the letters in my own

possession, written by Scott to the builder of Abbotsford, as the outer

decorations of the house were in process of completion, will show how

accurately Scott had pictured himself in Monkbarns.

"ABBOTSFORD: _April_ 21, 1817.

"DEAR SIR,--Nothing can be more obliging than your

attention to the old stones. You have been as true as the sundial

itself." [The sundial had just been erected.] "Of the two I would

prefer the larger one, as it is to be in front of a parapet quite

in the old taste. But in case of accidents it will be safest in

your custody till I come to town again on the 12th of May. Your

former favors (which were weighty as acceptable) have come safely

out here, and will be disposed of with great effect."

"ABBOTSFORD: _July_ 30th.

"I fancy the Tolbooth still keeps its feet, but, as it must soon

descend, I hope you will remember me. I have an important use for

the niche above the door; and though many a man has got a niche

_in_ the Tolbooth by building, I believe I am the first that ever

got a niche out of it on such an occasion. For which I have to

thank your kindness, and to remain very much your obliged humble

servant,

"WALTER SCOTT."

"_August 16._

"MY DEAR SIR,--I trouble you with this [_sic_] few lines

to thank you for the very accurate drawings and measurements of the

Tolbooth door, and for your kind promise to attend to my interest

and that of Abbotsford in the matter of the Thistle and Fleur de

Lis. Most of our scutcheons are now mounted, and look very well, as

the house is something after the model of an old hall (not a

castle), where such things are well in character." [Alas--Sir

Walter, Sir Walter!] "I intend the old lion to predominate over a

well which the children have christened the Fountain of the Lions.

His present den, however, continues to be the hall at Castle

Street."

"_September 5._

"DEAR SIR,--I am greatly obliged to you for securing the

stone. I am not sure that I will put up the gate quite in the old

form, but I would like to secure the means of doing so. The

ornamental stones are now put up, and have a very happy effect. If

you will have the kindness to let me know when the Tolbooth door

comes down, I will send in my carts for the stones; I have an

admirable situation for it. I suppose the door itself" [he means

the wooden one] "will be kept for the new jail; if not, and not

otherwise wanted, I would esteem it curious to possess it.

Certainly I hope so many sore hearts will not pass through the

celebrated door when in my possession as heretofore."

"_September 8._

"I should esteem it very fortunate if I could have the door also,

though I suppose it is modern, having been burned down at the time

of Porteous-mob.

"I am very much obliged to the gentlemen who thought these remains

of the Heart of Midlothian are not ill bestowed on their intended

possessor."]

[Footnote 64: Henceforward, not in affectation, but for the reader's

better convenience, I shall continue to spell "Ryme" without our wrongly

added _h_.]

[Footnote 65: L. ii. 278.]

[Footnote 66: "Che nella mente mia _ragiona_." Love--you observe, the

highest _Reasonableness_, instead of French _ivresse_, or even

Shakespearian "mere folly"; and Beatrice as the Goddess of Wisdom in

this third song of the _Convito_, to be compared with the Revolutionary

Goddess of Reason; remembering of the whole poem chiefly the line:--

"Costei penso chi che mosso l'universo."

(See Lyell's "Canzoniere," p. 104.)]

[Footnote 67: [Greek: hôran tês térpsios]--Plato, "Laws," ii., Steph.

669. "Hour" having here nearly the power of "Fate" with added sense of

being a daughter of Themis.]

[Footnote 68: "Gunpowder is one of the greatest inventions of modern

times, _and what has given such a superiority to civilized nations over

barbarous_"! ("Evenings at Home"--fifth evening.) No man can owe more

than I both to Mrs. Barbauld and Miss Edgeworth; and I only wish that in

the substance of what they wisely said, they had been more listened to.

Nevertheless, the germs of all modern conceit and error respecting

manufacture and industry, as rivals to Art and to Genius, are

concentrated in "Evenings at Home" and "Harry and Lucy"--being all the

while themselves works of real genius, and prophetic of things that have

yet to be learned and fulfilled. See for instance the paper, "Things by

their Right Names," following the one from which I have just quoted

("The Ship"), and closing the first volume of the old edition of the

"Evenings."]

[Footnote 69: Carlyle, "French Revolution" (Chapman, 1869), vol. ii. p.

70; conf. p. 25, and the _Ça ira_ at Arras, vol. iii. p. 276.]

[Footnote 70: _Ibid._ iii. 26.]

[Footnote 71: Carlyle, "French Revolution," iii. 106, the last sentence

altered in a word or two.]

[Footnote 72: I have been greatly disappointed, in taking soundings of

our most majestic mountain pools, to find them, in no case, verge on the

unfathomable.]

FICTION, FAIR AND FOUL.

III.[73]

[BYRON]

"Parching summer hath no warrant

To consume this crystal well;

Rains, that make each brook a torrent,

Neither sully it, nor swell."

53. So was it year by year, among the unthought-of hills. Little Duddon

and child Rotha ran clear and glad; and laughed from ledge to pool, and

opened from pool to mere, translucent, through endless days of peace.

But eastward, between her orchard plains, Loire locked her embracing

dead in silent sands; dark with blood rolled Iser; glacial-pale,

Beresina-Lethe, by whose shore the weary hearts forgot their people, and

their father's house.

Nor unsullied, Tiber; nor unswoln, Arno and Aufidus; and Euroclydon high

on Helle's wave; meantime, let our happy piety glorify the garden rocks

with snowdrop circlet, and breathe the spirit of Paradise, where life is

wise and innocent.

Maps many have we, nowadays clear in display of earth constituent, air

current, and ocean tide. Shall we ever engrave the map of meaner

research, whose shadings shall content themselves in the task of showing

the depth, or drought,--the calm, or trouble, of Human Compassion?

54. For this is indeed all that is noble in the life of Man, and the

source of all that is noble in the speech of Man. Had it narrowed itself

then, in those days, out of all the world, into this peninsula between

Cockermouth and Shap?

Not altogether so; but indeed the _Vocal_ piety seemed conclusively to

have retired (or excursed?) into that mossy hermitage, above Little

Langdale. The _Un_vocal piety, with the uncomplaining sorrow, of Man,

may have a somewhat wider range, for aught we know: but history

disregards those items; and of firmly proclaimed and sweetly canorous

religion, there really seemed at that juncture none to be reckoned upon,

east of Ingleborough, or north of Criffel. Only under Furness Fells, or

by Bolton Priory, it seems we can still write Ecclesiastical Sonnets,

stanzas on the force of Prayer, Odes to Duty, and complimentary

addresses to the Deity upon His endurance for adoration. Far otherwise,

over yonder, by Spezzia Bay, and Ravenna Pineta, and in ravines of

Hartz. There, the softest voices speak the wildest words; and Keats

discourses of Endymion, Shelley of Demogorgon, Goethe of Lucifer, and

Burger of the Resurrection of Death unto Death--while even Puritan

Scotland and Episcopal Anglia produce for us only these three minstrels

of doubtful tone, who show but small respect for the "unco guid," put

but limited faith in gifted Gilfillan, and translate with unflinching

frankness the _Morgante Maggiore_.[74]

55. Dismal the aspect of the spiritual world, or at least the sound of

it, might well seem to the eyes and ears of Saints (such as we had) of

the period--dismal in angels' eyes also assuredly! Yet is it possible

that the dismalness in angelic sight may be otherwise quartered, as it

were, from the way of mortal heraldry; and that seen, and heard, of

angels,--again I say--hesitatingly--_is_ it possible that the goodness

of the Unco Guid, and the gift of Gilfillan, and the word of Mr.

Blattergowl, may severally not have been the goodness of God, the gift

of God, nor the word of God: but that in the much blotted and broken

efforts at goodness, and in the careless gift which they themselves

despised,[75] and in the sweet ryme and murmur of their unpurposed

words, the Spirit of the Lord had, indeed, wandering, as in chaos days

on lightless waters, gone forth in the hearts and from the lips of those

other three strange prophets, even though they ate forbidden bread by

the altar of the poured-out ashes, and even though the wild beast of the

desert found them, and slew.

This, at least, I know, that it had been well for England, though all

her other prophets, of the Press, the Parliament, the Doctor's chair,

and the Bishop's throne, had fallen silent; so only that she had been

able to understand with her heart here and there the simplest line of

these, her despised.

56. I take one at mere chance:

"Who thinks of self, when gazing on the sky?"[76]

Well, I don't know; Mr. Wordsworth certainly did, and observed, with

truth, that its clouds took a sober coloring in consequence of his

experiences. It is much if, indeed, this sadness be unselfish, and our

eyes _have_ kept loving watch o'er Man's Mortality. I have found it

difficult to make anyone nowadays believe that such sobriety can be; and

that Turner saw deeper crimson than others in the clouds of Goldau. But

that any should yet think the clouds brightened by Man's _Im_mortality

instead of dulled by his death,--and, gazing on the sky, look for the

day when every eye must gaze also--for behold, He cometh with

clouds--this it is no more possible for Christian England to apprehend,

however exhorted by her gifted and guid.

57. "But Byron was not thinking of such things!"--He, the reprobate! how

should such as he think of Christ?

Perhaps not wholly as you or I think of Him. Take, at chance, another

line or two, to try:

"Carnage (so Wordsworth tells you) is God's daughter;[77]

If he speak truth, she is Christ's sister, and

Just now, behaved as in the Holy Land."