amount of imagination upon the mere scene-painting, the external
trappings, the clothes, or dwelling-places of his performers. A
traveller into a strange country naturally gives us the external
peculiarities which strike him. Scott has to tell us what 'completed the
costume' of his Highland chiefs or mediæval barons. He took, in short,
to that 'buff-jerkin' business of which Carlyle speaks so
contemptuously, and fairly carried away the hearts of his contemporaries
by a lavish display of mediæval upholstery. Lockhart tells us that Scott
could not bear the commonplace daubings of walls with uniform coats of
white, blue, and grey. All the roofs at Abbotsford 'were, in appearance
at least, of carved oak, relieved by coats-of-arms duly blazoned at the
intersections of beams, and resting on cornices, to the eye of the same
material, but composed of casts in plaster of Paris, after the foliage,
the flowers, the grotesque monsters and dwarfs, and sometimes the
beautiful heads of nuns and confessors, on which he had doated from
infancy among the cloisters of Melrose Abbey.' The plaster looks as well
as the carved oak for a time; but the day speedily comes when the sham
crumbles into ashes, and Scott's knights and nobles, like his carved
cornices, became dust in the next generation. It is hard to say it, and
yet we fear it must be admitted, that many of those historical novels,
which once charmed all men, and for which we have still a lingering
affection, are rapidly converting themselves into mere débris of plaster
of Paris. Sir F. Palgrave says somewhere that 'historical novels are
mortal enemies to history,' and we are often tempted to add that they
are mortal enemies to fiction. There maybe an exception or two, but as a
rule the task is simply impracticable. The novelist is bound to come so
near to the facts that we feel the unreality of his portraits. Either
the novel becomes pure cram, a dictionary of antiquities dissolved in a
thin solution of romance, or, which is generally more refreshing, it
takes leave of accuracy altogether and simply takes the plot and the
costume from history, but allows us to feel that genuine moderns are
masquerading in the dress of a bygone century. Even in the last case, it
generally results in a kind of dance in fetters and a comparative
breakdown under self-imposed obligations. 'Ivanhoe' and 'Kenilworth' and
'Quentin Durward,' and the rest are of course audacious anachronisms for
the genuine historian. Scott was imposed upon by his own fancy. He was
probably not aware that his Balfour of Burley was real flesh and blood,
because painted from real people round him, while his Claverhouse is
made chiefly of plumes and jackboots. Scott is chiefly responsible for
the odd perversion of facts, which reached its height, as Macaulay
remarks, in the marvellous performance of our venerated ruler, George
IV. That monarch, he observes, 'thought that he could not give a more
striking proof of his respect for the usages which had prevailed in
Scotland before the Union than by disguising himself in what, before the
Union, was considered by nine Scotchmen out of ten as the dress of a
thief.' The passage recalls the too familiar anecdote about Scott and
the wine-glass consecrated by the sacred lips of his king. At one of
the portrait exhibitions in South Kensington was hung up a
representation of George IV., with the body of a stalwart highlander in
full costume, some seven or eight feet high; the face formed from the
red puffy cheeks developed by innumerable bottles of port and burgundy
at Carlton House; and the whole surmounted by a bonnet with waving
plumes. Scott was chiefly responsible for disguising that elderly London
debauchee in the costume of a wild Gaelic cattle-stealer, and was
apparently insensible of the gross absurdity. We are told that an air of
burlesque was thrown over the proceedings at Holyrood by the apparition
of a true London alderman in the same costume as his master. An alderman
who could burlesque such a monarch must indeed have been a credit to his
turtle-soup. Let us pass by with a brief lamentation that so great and
good a man laid himself open to Carlyle's charge of sham worship. We
have lost our love of buff jerkins and other scraps from mediæval
museums, and Scott is suffering from having preferred working in stucco
to carving in marble. We are perhaps inclined to saddle Scott
unconsciously with the sins of a later generation. Borrow, in his
delightful 'Lavengro,' meets a kind of Jesuit in disguise in that
sequestered dell where he beats 'the Blazing Tinman.' The Jesuit, if I
remember rightly, confides to him that Scott was a tool of that
diabolical conspiracy which has infected our old English Protestantism
with the poison of modern Popery. And, though the evil may be traced
further back, and was due to more general causes than the influence of
any one writer, Scott was clearly responsible in his degree for certain
recent phenomena. The buff jerkin became the lineal ancestor of various
copes, stoles, and chasubles which stink in the nostrils of honest
dissenters. Our modern revivalists profess to despise the flimsiness of
the first attempts in this direction. They laugh at the carpenter's
Gothic of Abbotsford or Strawberry Hill, and do not ask themselves how
their own more elaborate blundering will look in the eyes of a future
generation. What will our posterity think of our masquerading in old
clothes? Will they want a new Cromwell to sweep away nineteenth-century
shams, as his ancestors smashed mediæval ruins, or will they, as we may
rather hope, be content to let our pretentious rubbish find its natural
road to ruin? One thing is pretty certain, and in its way comforting;
that, however far the rage for revivalism may be pushed, nobody will
ever want to revive the nineteenth century. But for Scott, in spite of
his complicity in this wearisome process, there is something still to be
said. 'Ivanhoe' cannot be given up. The vivacity of the description--the
delight with which Scott throws himself into the pursuit of his
knicknacks and antiquarian rubbish, has something contagious about it.
'Ivanhoe,' let it be granted, is no longer a work for men, but it still
is, or still ought to be, delightful reading for boys. The ordinary boy,
indeed, when he reads anything, seems to choose descriptions of the
cricket-matches and boat-races in which his soul most delights. But
there must still be some unsophisticated youths who can relish 'Robinson
Crusoe' and the 'Arabian Nights' and other favourites of our own
childhood, and such at least should pore over the 'Gentle and free
passage of arms at Ashby,' admire those incredible feats with the
long-bow which would have enabled Robin Hood to meet successfully a
modern volunteer armed with the Martini-Henry, and follow the terrific
head-breaking of Front-de-Boeuf, Bois-Guilbert, the holy clerk of
Copmanshurst, and the _Noir Fainéant_, even to the time when, for no
particular reason beyond the exigencies of the story, the Templar
suddenly falls from his horse, and is discovered, to our no small
surprise, to be 'unscathed by the lance of the enemy,' and to have died
a victim to the violence of his own contending passions. If 'Ivanhoe'
has been exploded by Professor Freeman, it did good work in its day. If
it were possible for a critic to weigh the merits of a great man in a
balance, and to decide precisely how far his excellences exceed his
defects, we should have to set off Scott's real services to the spread
of a genuine historical spirit against the encouragement which he
afforded to its bastard counterfeit. To enable us rightly to appreciate
our forefathers, to recognise that they were living men, and to feel our
close connection with them, is to put a vivid imagination to one of its
worthiest uses. It was perhaps inevitable that we should learn to
appreciate our ancestors by paying them the doubtful compliment of
external mimicry; and that only by slow degrees, and at the price of
much humiliating experience, should we learn the simple lesson that a
childish adult has not the grace of childhood. Even in his errors,
however, Scott had the merit of unconsciousness, which is fast
disappearing from our more elaborate affectations; and, therefore,
though we regret, we are not irritated by his weakness and deficiency in
true insight. He really enjoys his playthings too naïvely for the
pleasure not to be a little contagious, when we can descend from our
critical dignity. In his later work, indeed, the effort becomes truly
painful, tending more to the provocation of sadness than of anger. But
that work is best forgotten except as an occasional warning.
Scott, however, understood, and nobody has better illustrated by
example, the true mode of connecting past and present. Mr. Palgrave,
whose recognition of the charm of Scott's lyrics merits our gratitude,
observes in the notes to the 'Golden Treasury' that the songs about
Brignall banks and Rosabelle exemplify 'the peculiar skill with which
Scott employs proper names;' nor, he adds, 'is there a surer sign of
high poetical genius.' The last remark might possibly be disputed; if
Milton possessed the same talent, so did Lord Macaulay, whose ballads,
admirable as they are, are not first-rate poetry; but the conclusion to
which the remark points is one which is illustrated by each of these
cases. The secret of the power is simply this, that a man whose mind is
full of historical associations somehow communicates to us something of
the sentiment which they awake in himself. Scott, as all who saw him
tell us, could never see an old tower, or a bank, or a rush of a stream
without instantly recalling a boundless collection of appropriate
anecdotes. He might be quoted as a case in point by those who would
explain all poetical imagination by the power of associating ideas. He
is the poet of association. A proper name acts upon him like a charm. It
calls up the past days, the heroes of the '41, or the skirmish of
Drumclog, or the old Covenanting times, by a spontaneous and
inexplicable magic. When the barest natural object is taken into his
imagination, all manner of past fancies and legends crystallise around
it at once.
Though it is more difficult to explain how the same glow which ennobled
them to him is conveyed to his readers, the process somehow takes place.
We catch the enthusiasm. A word, which strikes us as a bare abstraction
in the report of the Censor General, say, or in a collection of poor law
returns, gains an entirely new significance when he touches it in the
most casual manner. A kind of mellowing atmosphere surrounds all
objects in his pages, and tinges them with poetical hues. Even the
Scottish dialect, repulsive to some ignorant Southrons, becomes musical
to his true admirers. In this power lies one secret of Scott's most
successful writing. Thus, for example, I often fancy that the second
title of 'Waverley'--''Tis Sixty Years Since'--indicates precisely the
distance of time at which a romantic novelist should place himself from
his creations. They are just far enough from us to have acquired a
certain picturesque colouring, which conceals the vulgarity, and yet
leaves them living and intelligible beings. His best stories might be
all described as 'Tales of a Grandfather.' They have the charm of
anecdotes told to the narrator by some old man who had himself been part
of what he describes. Scott's best novels depend, for their deep
interest, upon the scenery and society with which he had been familiar
in his early days, more or less harmonised by removal to what we may
call, in a different sense from the common one, the twilight of history;
that period, namely, from which the broad glare of the present has
departed, and which we can yet dimly observe without making use of the
dark lantern of ancient historians, and accepting the guidance of
Dryasdust. Dandie Dinmont, though a contemporary of Scott's youth,
represented a fast perishing phase of society; and Balfour of Burley,
though his day was past, had yet left his mantle with many spiritual
descendants who were scarcely less familiar. Between the times so fixed
Scott seems to exhibit his genuine power; and within these limits we
should find it hard to name any second, or indeed any third.
Indeed, when we have gone as far as we please in denouncing shams,
ridiculing men in buff-jerkins, and the whole Wardour Street business of
gimcrack and Brummagem antiquities, it still remains true that Scott's
great service was what we may call the vivification of history. He made
us feel, it is generally said, as no one had ever made us feel before,
that the men of the past were once real human beings; and I can agree if
I am permitted to make a certain distinction. His best service, I should
say, was not so much in showing us the past as it was when it was
present; but in showing us the past as it is really still present. His
knights and crusaders and feudal nobles are after all unreal, and the
best critics felt even in his own day that his greatest triumphs were in
describing the Scottish peasantry of his time. Dandie Dinmont and Jeanie
Deans and their like are better than many Front de Boeufs and Robin
Hoods. It is in dealing with his own contemporaries that he really shows
the imaginative insight which entitles him to be called a great creator
as well as an amusing story-teller. But this, rightly stated, is not
inconsistent with the previous statement. For the special characteristic
of Scott as distinguished from his predecessors is precisely his clear
perception that the characters whom he loved so well and described so
vividly were the products of a long historical evolution. His patriotism
was the love of a country in which everything had obvious roots in its
previous history. The stout farmer Dinmont was the descendant of the old
borderers; the Deanses were survivals from the days of the Covenanters
or of John Knox; every peculiarity upon which he delighted to dwell was
invested with all the charm of descent from a long and picturesque
history. When Fielding describes the squires or lawyers of the
eighteenth century, he says nothing to show that he was even aware of
the existence of a seventeenth, or still less of a sixteenth century.
Scott can describe no character without assigning to it its place in
the social organism which has been growing up since the earliest dawn of
history. This was, of course, no accident. He came at the time when the
little provincial centres were just feeling the first invasion of the
great movements from without. Edinburgh, whether quite comparable to
Athens or not, had been for two or three generations a remarkable centre
of intellectual cultivation. Hume and Adam Smith were only the most
conspicuous members of a society which monopolised pretty well all the
philosophy which existed in the island and a great deal of the history
and criticism. In Scott's time the patriotic feeling which had been a
blind instinct was becoming more or less self-conscious. The literary
society in which Scott was leader of the Tories, and Jeffrey of the
Whigs, included a large proportion of the best intellect of the time and
was sufficiently in contact with the outside world to be conscious of
its own characteristics. When the crash of the French Revolution came in
Scott's youth, Burke denounced its _à priori_ abstract reasonings in the
name of prescription. A traditional order and belief were essential, as
he urged, to the well-being of every human society. What Scott did
afterwards was precisely to show by concrete instances, most vividly
depicted, the value and interest of a natural body of traditions. Like
many other of his ablest contemporaries, he saw with alarm the great
movement, of which the French Revolution was the obvious embodiment,
sweeping away all manner of local traditions and threatening to engulf
the little society which still retained its specific character in
Scotland. He was stirred, too, in his whole nature when any sacrilegious
reformer threatened to sweep away any part of the true old Scottish
system. And this is, in fact, the moral implicitly involved in Scott's
best work. Take the beggar, for example, Edie Ochiltree, the old
'bluegown.' Beggars, you say, are a nuisance and would be sentenced to
starvation by Mr. Malthus in the name of an abstract principle of
population. But look, says Scott, at the old-fashioned beggar as he
really was. He had his place in society; he was the depository of the
legends of the whole country-side: chatting with the lairds, the
confidential friend of fishermen, peasants, and farmers; the oracle in
all sports and ruler of village feasts; repaying in friendly offices far
more than the value of the alms which he took as a right; a respecter of
old privileges, because he had privileges himself; and ready when the
French came to take his part in fighting for the old country. There can
be no fear for a country, says Scott, where even the beggar is as ready
to take up arms as the noble. The bluegown, in short, is no waif and
stray, no product of social corruption, or mere obnoxious parasite, but
a genuine member of the fabric, who could respect himself and scorn
servility as much as the highest members of the social hierarchy. Scott,
as Lockhart tells us, was most grievously wounded by the insults of the
Radical mob in Selkirk, who cried 'Burke Sir Walter!' in the place where
all men had loved and honoured him. It was the meeting of the old and
new, and the revelation to Scott in brutal terms of the new spirit which
was destroying all the old social ties. Scott and Wordsworth and
Coleridge and Southey and their like saw in fact the approach of that
industrial revolution, as we call it now, which for good or evil has
been ever since developing. The Radicals denounced them as mere
sentimentalists; the solid Whigs, who fancied that the revolution was
never to get beyond the Reform Bill of 1832, laughed at them as mere
obstructives; by us, who, whatever our opinions, speak with the
advantage of later experience, it must be admitted that such
Conservatism had its justification, and that good and far-seeing men
might well look with alarm at changes whose far-reaching consequences
cannot yet be estimated. Scott, meanwhile, is the incomparable painter
of the sturdy race which he loved so well--a race high-spirited, loyal
to its principles, surpassingly energetic, full of strong affections and
manly spirits, if crabbed, bigoted, and capable of queer perversity and
narrow self-conceit. Nor, if we differ from his opinions, can anyone who
desires to take a reasonable view of history doubt the interest and
value of the conceptions involved. Scott was really the first
imaginative observer who saw distinctly how the national type of
character is the product of past history, and embodies all the great
social forces by which it has slowly shaped itself. That is the new
element in his portraiture of human life; and we may pardon him if he
set rather too high a value upon the picturesque elements which he had
been the first to recognise. One of the acutest of recent writers upon
politics, the late Mr. Bagehot, has insisted upon the immense value of
what he called a 'solid cake of customs,' and the thought is more or
less familiar to every writer of the evolutionist way of thinking.
Scott, without any philosophy to speak of, political or otherwise, saw
and recognised intuitively a typical instance. He saw how much the
social fabric had been woven out of ancient tradition; and he made
others see it more clearly than could be done by any abstract reasoner.
When naturalists wish to preserve a skeleton, they bury an animal in an
ant-hill and dig him up after many days with all the perishable matter
fairly eaten away. That is the process which great men have to undergo.
A vast multitude of insignificant, unknown, and unconscious critics
destroy what has no genuine power of resistance, and leave the remainder
for posterity. Much disappears in every case, and it is a question,
perhaps, whether the firmer parts of Scott's reputation will be
sufficiently coherent to resist after the removal of the rubbish. We
must admit that even his best work is of more or less mixed value, and
that the test will be a severe one. Yet we hope, not only for reasons
already suggested, but for one which remains to be expressed. The
ultimate source of pleasure derivable from all art is that it brings you
into communication with the artist. What you really love in the picture
or the poem is the painter or the poet whom it brings into sympathy with
you across the gulf of time. He tells you what are the thoughts which
some fragment of natural scenery, or some incident of human life,
excited in a mind greatly wiser and more perceptive than your own. A
dramatist or a novelist professes to describe different actors on his
little scene, but he is really setting forth the varying phases of his
own mind. And so Dandie Dinmont, or the Antiquary, or Balfour of Burley,
is merely the conductor through which Scott's personal magnetism affects
our own natures. And certainly, whatever faults a critic may discover in
the work, it may be said that no work in our literature places us in
communication with a manlier or more lovable nature. Scott, indeed,
setting up as the landed proprietor at Abbotsford, and solacing himself
with painted plaster of Paris instead of carved oak, does not strike us,
any more than he does Carlyle, as a very noble phenomenon. But luckily
for us, we have also the Scott who must have been the most charming of
all conceivable companions; the Scott who was idolised even by a
judicious pig; the Scott, who, unlike the irritable race of literary
magnates in general, never lost a friend, and whose presence diffused an
equable glow of kindly feeling to the farthest limits of the social
system which gravitated round him. He was not precisely brilliant;
nobody, so far as we know, who wrote so many sentences has left so few
that have fixed themselves upon us as established commonplaces; beyond
that unlucky phrase about 'my name being MacGregor and my foot being on
my native heath'--which is not a very admirable sentiment--I do not at
present remember a single gem of this kind. Landor, I think, said that
in the whole of Scott's poetry there was only one good line, that,
namely, in the poem about Helvellyn referring to the dog of the lost
man--
When the wind waved his garments, how oft didst thou start!
Scott is not one of the coruscating geniuses, throwing out epigrams at
every turn, and sparkling with good things. But the poetry, which was
first admired to excess and then rejected with undue contempt, is now
beginning to find its due level. It is not poetry of the first order. It
is not the poetry of deep meditation or of rapt enthusiasm. Much that
was once admired has now become rather offensive than otherwise. And yet
it has a charm, which becomes more sensible the more familiar we grow
with it, the charm of unaffected and spontaneous love of nature; and not
only is it perfectly in harmony with the nature which Scott loved so
well, but it is still the best interpreter of the sound healthy love of
wild scenery. Wordsworth, no doubt, goes deeper; and Byron is more
vigorous; and Shelley more ethereal. But it is, and will remain, a good
thing to have a breath from the Cheviots brought straight into London
streets, as Scott alone can do it. When Washington Irving visited
Scott, they had an amicable dispute as to the scenery: Irving, as became
an American, complaining of the absence of forests; Scott declaring his
love for 'his honest grey hills,' and saying that if he did not see the
heather once a year he thought he should die. Everybody who has
refreshed himself with mountain and moor this summer should feel how
much we owe, and how much more we are likely to owe in future, to the
man who first inoculated us with his own enthusiasm, and who is still
the best interpreter of the 'honest grey hills.' Scott's poetical
faculty may, perhaps, be more felt in his prose than his verse. The fact
need not be decided; but as we read the best of his novels we feel
ourselves transported to the 'distant Cheviot's blue;' mixing with the
sturdy dalesmen, and the tough indomitable puritans of his native land;
for their sakes we can forgive the exploded feudalism and the faded
romance which he attempted with less success to galvanise into life. The
pleasure of that healthy open-air life, with that manly companion, is
not likely to diminish; and Scott as its exponent may still retain a
hold upon our affections which would have been long ago forfeited if he
had depended entirely on his romantic nonsense. We are rather in the
habit of talking about a healthy animalism, and try most elaborately to
be simple and manly. When we turn from our modern professors in that
line, who affect a total absence of affectation, to Scott's Dandie
Dinmonts and Edie Ochiltrees, we see the difference between the sham and
the reality, and fancy that Scott may still have a lesson or two to
preach to this generation. Those to come must take care of themselves.
_NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE_
The most obvious fact about Hawthorne is that he gave one solution of
the problem what elements of romance are discoverable amongst the harsh
prose of this prosaic age. How is the novelist who, by the inevitable
conditions of his style, is bound to come into the closest possible
contact with facts, who has to give us the details of his hero's
clothes, to tell us what he had for breakfast, and what is the state of
the balance at his banker's--how is he to introduce the ideal element
which must, in some degree, be present in all genuine art? What
precisely is meant by 'ideal' is a question which for the moment I
pretermit. Anyhow a mere photographic reproduction of this muddy,
money-making, bread-and-butter-eating world would be intolerable. At the
very lowest, some effort must be made at least to select the most
promising materials, and to strain out the coarse or the simply prosaic
ingredients. Various attempts have been made to solve the problem since
De Foe founded the modern school of English novelists, by giving us what
is in one sense a servile imitation of genuine narrative, but which is
redeemed from prose by the unique force of the situation. De Foe
painting mere everyday pots and pans is as dull as a modern blue-book;
but when his pots and pans are the resource by which a human being
struggles out of the most appalling conceivable 'slough of despond,'
they become more poetical than the vessels from which the gods drink
nectar in epic poems. Since he wrote, novelists have made many voyages
of discovery, with varying success, though they have seldom had the
fortune to touch upon so marvellous an island as that still sacred to
the immortal Crusoe. They have ventured far into cloud-land, and,
returning to _terra firma_, they have plunged into the trackless and
savage-haunted regions which are girdled by the Metropolitan Railway.
They have watched the magic coruscations of some strange 'Aurora
Borealis' of dim romance, or been content with the domestic gaslight of
London streets. Amongst the most celebrated of all such adventurers were
the band which obeyed the impulse of Sir Walter Scott. For a time it
seemed that we had reached a genuine Eldorado of novelists, where solid
gold was to be had for the asking, and visions of more than earthly
beauty rewarded the labours of the explorer. Now, alas! our opinion is a
good deal changed; the fairy treasures which Scott brought back from his
voyages have turned into dead leaves according to custom; and the
curiosities, upon which he set so extravagant a price, savour more of
Wardour Street than of the genuine mediæval artists. Nay, there are
scoffers, though I am not of them, who think that the tittle-tattle
which Miss Austen gathered at the country-houses of our grandfathers is
worth more than the showy but rather flimsy eloquence of the 'Ariosto of
the North.' Scott endeavoured at least, if with indifferent success, to
invest his scenes with something of
The light that never was on sea or land,
The consecration and the poet's dream.