THE WAVERLEY NOVELS.
In the summer of 1814, Scott took up again and completed--almost at a
single heat,--a fragment of a Jacobite story, begun in 1805 and then
laid aside. It was published anonymously, and its astonishing success
turned back again the scales of Scott's fortunes, already inclining
ominously towards a catastrophe. This story was _Waverley_. Mr.
Carlyle has praised _Waverley_ above its fellows. "On the whole,
contrasting _Waverley_, which was carefully written, with most of its
followers which were written extempore, one may regret the extempore
method." This is, however, a very unfortunate judgment. Not one of the
whole series of novels appears to have been written more completely
extempore than the great bulk of _Waverley_, including almost
everything that made it either popular with the million or fascinating
to the fastidious; and it is even likely that this is one of the
causes of its excellence.
"The last two volumes," says Scott, in a letter to Mr. Morritt, "were
written in three weeks." And here is Mr. Lockhart's description of the
effect which Scott's incessant toil during the composition, produced
on a friend whose window happened to command the novelist's study:--
"Happening to pass through Edinburgh in June, 1814, I dined
one day with the gentleman in question (now the Honourable
William Menzies, one of the Supreme Judges at the Cape of
Good Hope), whose residence was then in George Street,
situated very near to, and at right angles with, North
Castle Street. It was a party of very young persons, most of
them, like Menzies and myself, destined for the Bar of
Scotland, all gay and thoughtless, enjoying the first flush
of manhood, with little remembrance of the yesterday, or
care of the morrow. When my companion's worthy father and
uncle, after seeing two or three bottles go round, left the
juveniles to themselves, the weather being hot, we adjourned
to a library which had one large window looking northwards.
After carousing here for an hour or more, I observed that a
shade had come over the aspect of my friend, who happened to
be placed immediately opposite to myself, and said something
that intimated a fear of his being unwell. 'No,' said he, 'I
shall be well enough presently, if you will only let me sit
where you are, and take my chair; for there is a confounded
hand in sight of me here, which has often bothered me
before, and now it won't let me fill my glass with a good
will.' I rose to change places with him accordingly, and he
pointed out to me this hand, which, like the writing on
Belshazzar's wall, disturbed his hour of hilarity. 'Since we
sat down,' he said, 'I have been watching it--it fascinates
my eye--it never stops--page after page is finished, and
thrown on that heap of MS., and still it goes on unwearied;
and so it will be till candles are brought in, and God knows
how long after that. It is the same every night--I can't
stand a sight of it when I am not at my books.' 'Some
stupid, dogged engrossing clerk, probably,' exclaimed
myself, 'or some other giddy youth in our society.' 'No,
boys,' said our host; 'I well know what hand it is--'tis
Walter Scott's.'"[32]
If that is not extempore writing, it is difficult to say what
extempore writing is. But in truth, there is no evidence that any one
of the novels was laboured, or even so much as carefully composed.
Scott's method of composition was always the same; and, when writing
an imaginative work, the rate of progress seems to have been pretty
even, depending much more on the absence of disturbing engagements,
than on any mental irregularity. The morning was always his brightest
time; but morning or evening, in country or in town, well or ill,
writing with his own pen or dictating to an amanuensis in the
intervals of screaming-fits due to the torture of cramp in the
stomach, Scott spun away at his imaginative web almost as evenly as a
silkworm spins at its golden cocoon. Nor can I detect the slightest
trace of any difference in quality between the stories, such as can be
reasonably ascribed to comparative care or haste. There are
differences, and even great differences, of course, ascribable to the
less or greater suitability of the subject chosen to Scott's genius,
but I can find no trace of the sort of cause to which Mr. Carlyle
refers. Thus, few, I suppose, would hesitate to say that while _Old
Mortality_ is very near, if not quite, the finest of Scott's works,
_The Black Dwarf_ is not far from the other end of the scale. Yet the
two were written in immediate succession (_The Black Dwarf_ being the
first of the two), and were published together, as the first series of
_Tales of my Landlord_, in 1816. Nor do I think that any competent
critic would find any clear deterioration of quality in the novels of
the later years,--excepting of course the two written after the stroke
of paralysis. It is true, of course, that some of the subjects which
most powerfully stirred his imagination were among his earlier themes,
and that he could not effectually use the same subject twice, though
he now and then tried it. But making allowance for this
consideration, the imaginative power of the novels is as astonishingly
_even_ as the rate of composition itself. For my own part, I greatly
prefer _The Fortunes of Nigel_ (which was written in 1822) to
_Waverley_ which was begun in 1805, and finished in 1814, and though
very many better critics would probably decidedly disagree, I do not
think that any of them would consider this preference grotesque or
purely capricious. Indeed, though _Anne of Geierstein_,--the last
composed before Scott's stroke,--would hardly seem to any careful
judge the equal of _Waverley_, I do not much doubt that if it had
appeared in place of _Waverley_, it would have excited very nearly as
much interest and admiration; nor that had _Waverley_ appeared in
1829, in place of _Anne of Geierstein_, it would have failed to excite
very much more. In these fourteen most effective years of Scott's
literary life, during which he wrote twenty-three novels besides
shorter tales, the best stories appear to have been on the whole the
most rapidly written, probably because they took the strongest hold of
the author's imagination.
Till near the close of his career as an author, Scott never avowed his
responsibility for any of these series of novels, and even took some
pains to mystify the public as to the identity between the author of
_Waverley_ and the author of _Tales of my Landlord_. The care with
which the secret was kept is imputed by Mr. Lockhart in some degree to
the habit of mystery which had grown upon Scott during his secret
partnership with the Ballantynes; but in this he seems to be
confounding two very different phases of Scott's character. No doubt
he was, as a professional man, a little ashamed of his commercial
speculation, and unwilling to betray it. But he was far from ashamed
of his literary enterprise, though it seems that he was at first very
anxious lest a comparative failure, or even a mere moderate success,
in a less ambitious sphere than that of poetry, should endanger the
great reputation he had gained as a poet. That was apparently the
first reason for secrecy. But, over and above this, it is clear that
the mystery stimulated Scott's imagination and saved him trouble as
well. He was obviously more free under the veil--free from the
liability of having to answer for the views of life or history
suggested in his stories; but besides this, what was of more
importance to him, the slight disguise stimulated his sense of humour,
and gratified the whimsical, boyish pleasure which he always had in
acting an imaginary character. He used to talk of himself as a sort of
Abou Hassan--a private man one day, and acting the part of a monarch
the next--with the kind of glee which indicated a real delight in the
change of parts, and I have little doubt that he threw himself with
the more gusto into characters very different from his own, in
consequence of the pleasure it gave him to conceive his friends
hopelessly misled by this display of traits, with which he supposed
that they could not have credited him even in imagination. Thus
besides relieving him of a host of compliments which he did not enjoy,
and enabling him the better to evade an ill-bred curiosity, the
disguise no doubt was the same sort of fillip to the fancy which a
mask and domino or a fancy dress are to that of their wearers. Even in
a disguise a man cannot cease to be himself; but he can get rid of his
improperly "imputed" righteousness--often the greatest burden he has
to bear--and of all the expectations formed on the strength, as Mr.
Clough says,--
"Of having been what one has been,
What one thinks one is, or thinks that others suppose one."
To some men the freedom of this disguise is a real danger and
temptation. It never could have been so to Scott, who was in the main
one of the simplest as well as the boldest and proudest of men. And as
most men perhaps would admit that a good deal of even the best part of
their nature is rather suppressed than expressed by the name by which
they are known in the world, Scott must have felt this in a far higher
degree, and probably regarded the manifold characters under which he
was known to society, as representing him in some respects more justly
than any individual name could have done. His mind ranged hither and
thither over a wide field--far beyond that of his actual
experience,--and probably ranged over it all the more easily for not
being absolutely tethered to a single class of associations by any
public confession of his authorship. After all, when it became
universally known that Scott was the only author of all these tales,
it may be doubted whether the public thought as adequately of the
imaginative efforts which had created them, as they did while they
remained in some doubt whether there was a multiplicity of agencies at
work, or only one. The uncertainty helped them to realize the many
lives which were really led by the author of all these tales, more
completely than any confession of the individual authorship could have
done. The shrinking of activity in public curiosity and wonder which
follows the final determination of such ambiguities, is very apt to
result rather in a dwindling of the imaginative effort to enter into
the genius which gave rise to them, than in an increase of respect for
so manifold a creative power.
When Scott wrote, such fertility as his in the production of novels
was regarded with amazement approaching to absolute incredulity. Yet
he was in this respect only the advanced-guard of a not
inconsiderable class of men and women who have a special gift for
pouring out story after story, containing a great variety of figures,
while retaining a certain even level of merit. There is more than one
novelist of the present day who has far surpassed Scott in the number
of his tales, and one at least of very high repute, who has, I
believe, produced more even within the same time. But though to our
larger experience, Scott's achievement, in respect of mere fertility,
is by no means the miracle which it once seemed, I do not think one of
his successors can compare with him for a moment in the ease and truth
with which he painted, not merely the life of his own time and
country--seldom indeed that of precisely his own time--but that of
days long past, and often too of scenes far distant. The most powerful
of all his stories, _Old Mortality_, was the story of a period more
than a century and a quarter before he wrote; and others,--which
though inferior to this in force, are nevertheless, when compared with
the so-called historical romances of any other English writer, what
sunlight is to moonlight, if you can say as much for the latter as to
admit even that comparison,--go back to the period of the Tudors, that
is, two centuries and a half. _Quentin Durward_, which is all but
amongst the best, runs back farther still, far into the previous
century, while _Ivanhoe_ and _The Talisman_, though not among the
greatest of Scott's works, carry us back more than five hundred years.
The new class of extempore novel writers, though more considerable
than, sixty years ago, any one could have expected ever to see it, is
still limited, and on any high level of merit will probably always be
limited, to the delineation of the times of which the narrator has
personal experience. Scott seemed to have had something very like
personal experience of a few centuries at least, judging by the ease
and freshness with which he poured out his stories of these centuries,
and though no one can pretend that even he could describe the period
of the Tudors as Miss Austen described the country parsons and squires
of George the Third's reign, or as Mr. Trollope describes the
politicians and hunting-men of Queen Victoria's, it is nevertheless
the evidence of a greater imagination to make us live so familiarly as
Scott does amidst the political and religious controversies of two or
three centuries' duration, to be the actual witnesses, as it were, of
Margaret of Anjou's throes of vain ambition, and Mary Stuart's
fascinating remorse, and Elizabeth's domineering and jealous
balancings of noble against noble, of James the First's shrewd
pedantries, and the Regent Murray's large forethought, of the politic
craft of Argyle, the courtly ruthlessness of Claverhouse, and the
high-bred clemency of Monmouth, than to reflect in countless
modifications the freaks, figures, and fashions of our own time.
The most striking feature of Scott's romances is that, for the most part,
they are pivoted on public rather than mere private interests and
passions. With but few exceptions--(_The Antiquary_, _St. Ronan's Well_,
and _Guy Mannering_ are the most important)--Scott's novels give us an
imaginative view, not of mere individuals, but of individuals as they are
affected by the public strifes and social divisions of the age. And this
it is which gives his books so large an interest for old and young,
soldiers and statesmen, the world of society and the recluse, alike. You
can hardly read any novel of Scott's and not become better aware what
public life and political issues mean. And yet there is no artificiality,
no elaborate attitudinizing before the antique mirrors of the past, like
Bulwer's, no dressing out of clothes-horses like G. P. R. James. The
boldness and freshness of the present are carried back into the past, and
you see Papists and Puritans, Cavaliers and Roundheads, Jews, Jacobites,
and freebooters, preachers, schoolmasters, mercenary soldiers, gipsies,
and beggars, all living the sort of life which the reader feels that in
their circumstances and under the same conditions of time and place and
parentage, he might have lived too. Indeed, no man can read Scott without
being more of a public man, whereas the ordinary novel tends to make its
readers rather less of one than before.
Next, though most of these stories are rightly called romances, no one
can avoid observing that they give that side of life which is
unromantic, quite as vigorously as the romantic side. This was not
true of Scott's poems, which only expressed one-half of his nature,
and were almost pure romances. But in the novels the business of life
is even better portrayed than its sentiments. Mr. Bagehot, one of the
ablest of Scott's critics, has pointed out this admirably in his essay
on _The Waverley Novels_. "Many historical novelists," he says,
"especially those who with care and pains have read up the detail, are
often evidently in a strait how to pass from their history to their
sentiment. The fancy of Sir Walter could not help connecting the two.
If he had given us the English side of the race to Derby, _he would
have described the Bank of England paying in sixpences, and also the
loves of the cashier_." No one who knows the novels well can question
this. Fergus MacIvor's ways and means, his careful arrangements for
receiving subsidies in black mail, are as carefully recorded as his
lavish highland hospitalities; and when he sends his silver cup to the
Gaelic bard who chaunts his greatness, the faithful historian does not
forget to let us know that the cup is his last, and that he is
hard-pressed for the generosities of the future. So too the habitual
thievishness of the highlanders is pressed upon us quite as vividly as
their gallantry and superstitions. And so careful is Sir Walter to
paint the petty pedantries of the Scotch traditional conservatism,
that he will not spare even Charles Edward--of whom he draws so
graceful a picture--the humiliation of submitting to old Bradwardine's
"solemn act of homage," but makes him go through the absurd ceremony
of placing his foot on a cushion to have its brogue unlatched by the
dry old enthusiast of heraldic lore. Indeed it was because Scott so
much enjoyed the contrast between the high sentiment of life and its
dry and often absurd detail, that his imagination found so much freer
a vent in the historical romance, than it ever found in the romantic
poem. Yet he clearly needed the romantic excitement of picturesque
scenes and historical interests, too. I do not think he would ever
have gained any brilliant success in the narrower region of the
domestic novel. He said himself, in expressing his admiration of Miss
Austen, "The big bow-wow strain I can do myself, like any now going,
but the exquisite touch which renders ordinary commonplace things and
characters interesting, from the truth of the description and the
sentiment, is denied to me." Indeed he tried it to some extent in _St.
Ronan's Well_, and so far as he tried it, I think he failed. Scott
needed a certain largeness of type, a strongly-marked class-life, and,
where it was possible, a free, out-of-doors life, for his
delineations. _No_ one could paint beggars and gipsies, and wandering
fiddlers, and mercenary soldiers, and peasants and farmers and
lawyers, and magistrates, and preachers, and courtiers, and statesmen,
and best of all perhaps queens and kings, with anything like his
ability. But when it came to describing the small differences of
manner, differences not due to external habits, so much as to internal
sentiment or education, or mere domestic circumstance, he was beyond
his proper field. In the sketch of the St. Ronan's Spa and the company
at the _table-d'hôte_, he is of course somewhere near the mark,--he
was too able a man to fall far short of success in anything he really
gave to the world; but it is not interesting. Miss Austen would have
made Lady Penelope Penfeather a hundred times as amusing. We turn to
Meg Dods and Touchwood, and Cargill, and Captain Jekyl, and Sir Bingo
Binks, and to Clara Mowbray,--i. e. to the lives really moulded by
large and specific causes, for enjoyment, and leave the small gossip
of the company at the Wells as, relatively at least, a failure. And it
is well for all the world that it was so. The domestic novel, when
really of the highest kind, is no doubt a perfect work of art, and an
unfailing source of amusement; but it has nothing of the tonic
influence, the large instructiveness, the stimulating intellectual
air, of Scott's historic tales. Even when Scott is farthest from
reality--as in _Ivanhoe_ or _The Monastery_--he makes you open your
eyes to all sorts of historical conditions to which you would
otherwise be blind. The domestic novel, even when its art is perfect,
gives little but pleasure at the best; at the worst it is simply
scandal idealized.
Scott often confessed his contempt for his own heroes. He said of
Edward Waverley, for instance, that he was "a sneaking piece of
imbecility," and that "if he had married Flora, she would have set him
up upon the chimney-piece as Count Borowlaski's wife used to do with
him. I am a bad hand at depicting a hero, properly so called, and
have an unfortunate propensity for the dubious characters of
borderers, buccaneers, highland robbers, and all others of a
Robin-Hood description."[33] In another letter he says, "My rogue
always, in despite of me, turns out my hero."[34] And it seems very
likely that in most of the situations Scott describes so well, his own
course would have been that of his wilder impulses, and not that of
his reason. Assuredly he would never have stopped hesitating on the
line between opposite courses as his Waverleys, his Mortons, his
Osbaldistones do. Whenever he was really involved in a party strife,
he flung prudence and impartiality to the winds, and went in like the
hearty partisan which his strong impulses made of him. But granting
this, I do not agree with his condemnation of all his own colourless
heroes. However much they differed in nature from Scott himself, the
even balance of their reason against their sympathies is certainly
well conceived, is in itself natural, and is an admirable expedient
for effecting that which was probably its real use to Scott,--the
affording an opportunity for the delineation of all the pros and cons
of the case, so that the characters on both sides of the struggle
should be properly understood. Scott's imagination was clearly far
wider--was far more permeated with the fixed air of sound
judgment--than his practical impulses. He needed a machinery for
displaying his insight into both sides of a public quarrel, and his
colourless heroes gave him the instrument he needed. Both in Morton's
case (in _Old Mortality_), and in Waverley's, the hesitation is
certainly well described. Indeed in relation to the controversy
between Covenanters and Royalists, while his political and martial
prepossessions went with Claverhouse, his reason and educated moral
feeling certainly were clearly identified with Morton.
It is, however, obviously true that Scott's heroes are mostly created
for the sake of the facility they give in delineating the other
characters, and not the other characters for the sake of the heroes.
They are the imaginative neutral ground, as it were, on which opposing
influences are brought to play; and what Scott best loved to paint was
those who, whether by nature, by inheritance, or by choice, had become
unique and characteristic types of one-sided feeling, not those who
were merely in process of growth, and had not ranged themselves at
all. Mr. Carlyle, who, as I have said before, places Scott's romances
far below their real level, maintains that these great types of his
are drawn from the outside, and not made actually to live. "His Bailie
Jarvies, Dinmonts, Dalgettys (for their name is legion), do look and
talk like what they give themselves out for; they are, if not
_created_ and made poetically alive, yet deceptively _enacted_ as a
good player might do them. What more is wanted, then? For the reader
lying on a sofa, nothing more; yet for another sort of reader much. It
were a long chapter to unfold the difference in drawing a character
between a Scott and a Shakespeare or Goethe. Yet it is a difference
literally immense; they are of a different species; the value of the
one is not to be counted in the coin of the other. We might say in a
short word, which covers a long matter, that your Shakespeare fashions
his characters from the heart outwards; your Scott fashions them from
the skin inwards, never getting near the heart of them. The one set
become living men and women; the other amount to little more than
mechanical cases, deceptively painted automatons."[35] And then he
goes on to contrast Fenella in _Peveril of the Peak_ with Goethe's
Mignon. Mr. Carlyle could hardly have chosen a less fair comparison.
If Goethe is to be judged by his women, let Scott be judged by his
men. So judged, I think Scott will, as a painter of character--of
course, I am not now speaking of him as a poet,--come out far above
Goethe. Excepting the hero of his first drama (Götz of the iron hand),
which by the way was so much in Scott's line that his first essay in
poetry was to translate it--not very well--I doubt if Goethe was ever
successful with his pictures of men. _Wilhelm Meister_ is, as Niebuhr
truly said, "a ménagerie of tame animals." Doubtless Goethe's
women--certainly his women of culture--are more truly and inwardly
conceived and created than Scott's. Except Jeanie Deans and Madge
Wildfire, and perhaps Lucy Ashton, Scott's women are apt to be
uninteresting, either pink and white toys, or hardish women of the
world. But then no one can compare the men of the two writers, and not
see Scott's vast pre-eminence on that side.
I think the deficiency of his pictures of women, odd as it seems to
say so, should be greatly attributed to his natural chivalry. His
conception of women of his own or a higher class was always too
romantic. He hardly ventured, as it were, in his tenderness for them,
to look deeply into their little weaknesses and intricacies of
character. With women of an inferior class, he had not this feeling.
Nothing can be more perfect than the manner in which he blends the
dairy-woman and woman of business in Jeanie Deans, with the lover and
the sister. But once make a woman beautiful, or in any way an object
of homage to him, and Scott bowed so low before the image of her,
that he could not go deep into her heart. He could no more have
analysed such a woman, as Thackeray analyzed Lady Castlewood, or
Amelia, or Becky, or as George Eliot analysed Rosamond Vincy, than he
could have vivisected Camp or Maida. To some extent, therefore,
Scott's pictures of women remain something in the style of the
miniatures of the last age--bright and beautiful beings without any
special character in them. He was dazzled by a fair heroine. He could
not take them up into his imagination as real beings as he did men.
But then how living are his men, whether coarse or noble! What a
picture, for instance, is that in _A Legend of Montrose_ of the
conceited, pragmatic, but prompt and dauntless soldier of fortune,
rejecting Argyle's attempts to tamper with him, in the dungeon at
Inverary, suddenly throwing himself on the disguised Duke so soon as
he detects him by his voice, and wresting from him the means of his
own liberation! Who could read that scene and say for a moment that
Dalgetty is painted "from the skin inwards"? It was just Scott himself
breathing his own life through the habits of a good specimen of the
mercenary soldier--realizing where the spirit of hire would end, and
the sense of honour would begin--and preferring, even in a dungeon,
the audacious policy of a sudden attack to that of crafty negotiation.
What a picture (and a very different one) again is that in
_Redgauntlet_ of Peter Peebles, the mad litigant, with face emaciated
by poverty and anxiety, and rendered wild by "an insane lightness
about the eyes," dashing into the English magistrate's court for a
warrant against his fugitive counsel. Or, to take a third instance, as
different as possible from either, how powerfully conceived is the
situation in _Old Mortality_, where Balfour of Burley, in his fanatic
fury at the defeat of his plan for a new rebellion, pushes the
oak-tree, which connects his wild retreat with the outer world, into
the stream, and tries to slay Morton for opposing him. In such scenes
and a hundred others--for these are mere random examples--Scott
undoubtedly painted his masculine figures from as deep and inward a
conception of the character of the situation as Goethe ever attained,
even in drawing Mignon, or Klärchen, or Gretchen. The distinction has
no real existence. Goethe's pictures of women were no doubt the
intuitions of genius; and so are Scott's of men--and here and there of
his women too. Professional women he can always paint with power. Meg
Dods, the innkeeper, Meg Merrilies, the gipsy, Mause Headrigg, the
Covenanter, Elspeth, the old fishwife in _The Antiquary_, and the old
crones employed to nurse and watch, and lay out the corpse, in _The
Bride of Lammermoor_, are all in their way impressive figures.
And even in relation to women of a rank more fascinating to Scott, and
whose inner character was perhaps on that account, less familiar to
his imagination, grant him but a few hints from history, and he draws
a picture which, for vividness and brilliancy, may almost compare with
Shakespeare's own studies in English history. Had Shakespeare painted
the scene in _The Abbot_, in which Mary Stuart commands one of her
Mary's in waiting to tell her at what bridal she last danced, and Mary
Fleming blurts out the reference to the marriage of Sebastian at
Holyrood, would any one hesitate to regard it as a stroke of genius
worthy of the great dramatist? This picture of the Queen's mind
suddenly thrown off its balance, and betraying, in the agony of the
moment, the fear and remorse which every association with Darnley
conjured up, is painted "from the heart outwards," not "from the skin
inwards," if ever there were such a painting in the world. Scott
hardly ever failed in painting kings or peasants, queens or
peasant-women. There was something in the well-marked type of both to
catch his imagination, which can always hit off the grander features
of royalty, and the homelier features of laborious humility. Is there
any sketch traced in lines of more sweeping grandeur and more
impressive force than the following of Mary Stuart's lucid interval of
remorse--lucid compared with her ordinary mood, though it was of a
remorse that was almost delirious--which breaks in upon her hour of
fascinating condescension?--
"'Are they not a lovely couple, my Fleming? and is it not
heart-rending to think that I must be their ruin?'
"'Not so,' said Roland Græme, 'it is we, gracious sovereign,
who will be your deliverers.' '_Ex oribus parvulorum!_' said
the queen, looking upward; 'if it is by the mouth of these
children that heaven calls me to resume the stately thoughts
which become my birth and my rights, thou wilt grant them
thy protection, and to me the power of rewarding their
zeal.' Then turning to Fleming, she instantly added, 'Thou
knowest, my friend, whether to make those who have served me
happy, was not ever Mary's favourite pastime. When I have
been rebuked by the stern preachers of the Calvinistic
heresy--when I have seen the fierce countenances of my
nobles averted from me, has it not been because I mixed in
the harmless pleasures of the young and gay, and rather for
the sake of their happiness than my own, have mingled in the
masque, the song or the dance, with the youth of my
household? Well, I repent not of it--though Knox termed it
sin, and Morton degradation--I was happy because I saw
happiness around me: and woe betide the wretched jealousy
that can extract guilt out of the overflowings of an
unguarded gaiety!--Fleming, if we are restored to our
throne, shall we not have one blithesome day at a blithesome
bridal, of which we must now name neither the bride nor the
bridegroom? But that bridegroom shall have the barony of
Blairgowrie, a fair gift even for a queen to give, and that
bride's chaplet shall be twined with the fairest pearls that
ever were found in the depths of Lochlomond; and thou
thyself, Mary Fleming, the best dresser of tires that ever
busked the tresses of a queen, and who would scorn to touch
those of any woman of lower rank--thou thyself shalt for my
love twine them into the bride's tresses.--Look, my Fleming,
suppose then such clustered locks as these of our Catherine,
they would not put shame upon thy skill.' So saying she
passed her hand fondly over the head of her youthful
favourite, while her more aged attendant replied
despondently, 'Alas, madam, your thoughts stray far from
home.' 'They do, my Fleming,' said the queen, 'but is it
well or kind in you to call them back?--God knows they have
kept the perch this night but too closely.--Come, I will
recall the gay vision, were it but to punish them. Yes, at
that blithesome bridal, Mary herself shall forget the weight
of sorrows, and the toil of state, and herself once more
lead a measure.--At whose wedding was it that we last
danced, my Fleming? I think care has troubled my memory--yet
something of it I should remember, canst thou not aid me? I
know thou canst.' 'Alas, madam,' replied the lady. 'What,'
said Mary, 'wilt thou not help us so far? this is a peevish
adherence to thine own graver opinion which holds our talk
as folly. But thou art court-bred and wilt well understand
me when I say the queen _commands_ Lady Fleming to tell her
when she led the last _branle_.' With a face deadly pale and
a mien as if she were about to sink into the earth, the
court-bred dame, no longer daring to refuse obedience,
faltered out, 'Gracious lady--if my memory err not--it was
at a masque in Holyrood--at the marriage of Sebastian.' The
unhappy queen, who had hitherto listened with a melancholy
smile, provoked by the reluctance with which the Lady
Fleming brought out her story, at this ill-fated word
interrupted her with a shriek so wild and loud that the
vaulted apartment rang, and both Roland and Catherine sprung
to their feet in the utmost terror and alarm. Meantime, Mary
seemed, by the train of horrible ideas thus suddenly
excited, surprised not only beyond self-command, but for the
moment beyond the verge of reason. 'Traitress,' she said to
the Lady Fleming, 'thou wouldst slay thy sovereign. Call my
French guards--_à moi! à moi! mes Français_!--I am beset
with traitors in mine own palace--they have murdered my
husband--Rescue! Rescue! for the Queen of Scotland!' She
started up from her chair--her features late so exquisitely
lovely in their paleness, now inflamed with the fury of
frenzy, and resembling those of a Bellona. 'We will take the
field ourself,' she said; 'warn the city--warn Lothian and
Fife--saddle our Spanish barb, and bid French Paris see our
petronel be charged. Better to die at the head of our brave
Scotsmen, like our grandfather at Flodden, than of a broken
heart like our ill-starred father.' 'Be patient--be
composed, dearest sovereign,' said Catherine; and then
addressing Lady Fleming angrily, she added, 'How could you
say aught that reminded her of her husband?' The word
reached the ear of the unhappy princess who caught it up,
speaking with great rapidity, 'Husband!--what husband? Not
his most Christian Majesty--he is ill at ease--he cannot
mount on horseback--not him of the Lennox--but it was the
Duke of Orkney thou wouldst say?' 'For God's love, madam, be
patient!' said the Lady Fleming. But the queen's excited
imagination could by no entreaty be diverted from its
course. 'Bid him come hither to our aid,' she said, 'and
bring with him his lambs, as he calls them--Bowton, Hay of
Talla, Black Ormiston and his kinsman Hob--Fie, how swart
they are, and how they smell of sulphur! What! closeted with
Morton? Nay, if the Douglas and the Hepburn hatch the
complot together, the bird when it breaks the shell will
scare Scotland, will it not, my Fleming?' 'She grows wilder
and wilder,' said Fleming. 'We have too many hearers for
these strange words.' 'Roland,' said Catherine, 'in the name
of God begone!--you cannot aid us here--leave us to deal
with her alone--away--away!"
And equally fine is the scene in _Kenilworth_ in which Elizabeth
undertakes the reconciliation of the haughty rivals, Sussex and
Leicester, unaware that in the course of the audience she herself will
have to bear a great strain on her self-command, both in her feelings
as a queen and her feelings as a lover. Her grand rebukes to both, her
ill-concealed preference for Leicester, her whispered ridicule of
Sussex, the impulses of tenderness which she stifles, the flashes of
resentment to which she gives way, the triumph of policy over private
feeling, her imperious impatience when she is baffled, her jealousy as
she grows suspicious of a personal rival, her gratified pride and
vanity when the suspicion is exchanged for the clear evidence, as she
supposes, of Leicester's love, and her peremptory conclusion of the
audience, bring before the mind a series of pictures far more vivid
and impressive than the greatest of historical painters could fix on
canvas, even at the cost of the labour of years. Even more brilliant,
though not so sustained and difficult an effort of genius, is the
later scene in the same story, in which Elizabeth drags the unhappy
Countess of Leicester from her concealment in one of the grottoes of
Kenilworth Castle, and strides off with her, in a fit of vindictive
humiliation and Amazonian fury, to confront her with her husband. But
this last scene no doubt is more in Scott's way. He can always paint
women in their more masculine moods. Where he frequently fails is in
the attempt to indicate the finer shades of women's nature. In Amy
Robsart herself, for example, he is by no means generally successful,
though in an early scene her childish delight in the various orders
and decorations of her husband is painted with much freshness and
delicacy. But wherever, as in the case of queens, Scott can get a
telling hint from actual history, he can always so use it as to make
history itself seem dim to the equivalent for it which he gives us.
And yet, as every one knows, Scott was excessively free in his
manipulations of history for the purposes of romance. In _Kenilworth_
he represents Shakespeare's plays as already in the mouths of
courtiers and statesmen, though he lays the scene in the eighteenth
year of Elizabeth, when Shakespeare was hardly old enough to rob an
orchard. In _Woodstock_, on the contrary, he insists, if you compare
Sir Henry Lee's dates with the facts, that Shakespeare died twenty
years at least before he actually died. The historical basis, again,
of _Woodstock_ and of _Redgauntlet_ is thoroughly untrustworthy, and
about all the minuter details of history,--unless so far as they were
characteristic of the age,--I do not suppose that Scott in his
romances ever troubled himself at all. And yet few historians--not
even Scott himself when he exchanged romance for history--ever drew
the great figures of history with so powerful a hand. In writing
history and biography Scott has little or no advantage over very
inferior men. His pictures of Swift, of Dryden, of Napoleon, are in no
way very vivid. It is only where he is working from the pure
imagination,--though imagination stirred by historic study,--that he
paints a picture which follows us about, as if with living eyes,
instead of creating for us a mere series of lines and colours. Indeed,
whether Scott draws truly or falsely, he draws with such genius that
his pictures of Richard and Saladin, of Louis XI. and Charles the
Bold, of Margaret of Anjou and René of Provence, of Mary Stuart and
Elizabeth Tudor, of Sussex and of Leicester, of James and Charles and
Buckingham, of the two Dukes of Argyle--the Argyle of the time of the
revolution, and the Argyle of George II., of Queen Caroline, of
Claverhouse, and Monmouth, and of Rob Roy, will live in English
literature beside Shakespeare's pictures--probably less faithful if
more imaginative--of John and Richard and the later Henries, and all
the great figures by whom they were surrounded. No historical portrait
that we possess will take precedence--as a mere portrait--of Scott's
brilliant study of James I. in _The Fortunes of Nigel_. Take this
illustration for instance, where George Heriot the goldsmith (Jingling
Geordie, as the king familiarly calls him) has just been speaking of
Lord Huntinglen, as "a man of the old rough world that will drink and
swear:"--
"'O Geordie!' exclaimed the king, 'these are auld-warld
frailties, of whilk we dare not pronounce even ourselves
absolutely free. But the warld grows worse from day to day,
Geordie. The juveniles of this age may weel say with the
poet,--
"Ætas parentum pejor avis tulit
Nos nequiores--"
This Dalgarno does not drink so much; aye or swear so much,
as his father, but he wenches, Geordie, and he breaks his
word and oath baith. As to what ye say of the leddy and the
ministers, we are all fallible creatures, Geordie, priests
and kings as weel as others; and wha kens but what that may
account for the difference between this Dalgarno and his
father? The earl is the vera soul of honour, and cares nae
mair for warld's gear than a noble hound for the quest of a
foulmart; but as for his son, he was like to brazen us all
out--ourselves, Steenie, Baby Charles, and our Council, till
he heard of the tocher, and then by my kingly crown he lap
like a cock at a grossart! These are discrepancies betwixt
parent and son not to be accounted for naturally, according
to Baptista Porta, Michael Scott _de secretis_, and others.
Ah, Jingling Geordie, if your clouting the caldron, and
jingling on pots, pans, and veshels of all manner of metal,
hadna jingled a' your grammar out of your head, I could have
touched on that matter to you at mair length.' ... Heriot
inquired whether Lord Dalgarno had consented to do the Lady
Hermione justice. 'Troth, man, I have small doubt that he
will,' quoth the king, 'I gave him the schedule of her
worldly substance, which you delivered to us in the council,
and we allowed him half an hour to chew the cud upon that.
It is rare reading for bringing him to reason. I left Baby
Charles and Steenie laying his duty before him, and if he
can resist doing what _they_ desire him, why I wish he would
teach _me_ the gate of it. O Geordie, Jingling Geordie, it
was grand to hear Baby Charles laying down the guilt of
dissimulation, and Steenie lecturing _on_ the turpitude of
incontinence.' 'I am afraid,' said George Heriot, more
hastily than prudently, 'I might have thought of the old
proverb of Satan reproving sin.' 'Deil hae our saul,
neighbour,' said the king, reddening, 'but ye are not blate!
I gie ye licence to speak freely, and by our saul, ye do not
let the privilege become lost, _non utendo_--it will suffer
no negative prescription in your hands. Is it fit, think ye,
that Baby Charles should let his thoughts be publicly seen?
No, no, princes' thoughts are _arcana imperii: qui nescit
dissimulare, nescit regnare_. Every liege subject is bound
to speak the whole truth to the king, but there is nae
reciprocity of obligation--and for Steenie having been
whiles a dike-louper at a time, is it for you, who are his
goldsmith, and to whom, I doubt, he awes an uncomatable sum,
to cast that up to him?"
Assuredly there is no undue favouring of Stuarts in such a picture as
that.
Scott's humour is, I think, of very different qualities in relation to
different subjects. Certainly he was at times capable of considerable
heaviness of hand,--of the Scotch "wut" which has been so irreverently
treated by English critics. His rather elaborate jocular
introductions, under the name of Jedediah Cleishbotham, are clearly
laborious at times. And even his own letters to his daughter-in-law,
which Mr. Lockhart seems to regard as models of tender playfulness and
pleasantry, seem to me decidedly elephantine. Not unfrequently, too,
his stereotyped jokes weary. Dalgetty bores you almost as much as he
would do in real life,--which is a great fault in art. Bradwardine
becomes a nuisance, and as for Sir Piercie Shafton, he is beyond
endurance. Like some other Scotchmen of genius, Scott twanged away at
any effective chord till it more than lost its expressiveness. But in
dry humour, and in that higher humour which skilfully blends the
ludicrous and the pathetic, so that it is hardly possible to separate
between smiles and tears, Scott is a master. His canny innkeeper, who,
having sent away all the peasemeal to the camp of the Covenanters, and
all the oatmeal (with deep professions of duty) to the castle and its
cavaliers, in compliance with the requisitions sent to him on each
side, admits with a sigh to his daughter that "they maun gar wheat
flour serve themsels for a blink,"--his firm of solicitors, Greenhorn
and Grinderson, whose senior partner writes respectfully to clients in
prosperity, and whose junior partner writes familiarly to those in
adversity,--his arbitrary nabob who asks how the devil any one should
be able to mix spices so well "as one who has been where they
grow;"--his little ragamuffin who indignantly denies that he has
broken his promise not to gamble away his sixpences at pitch-and-toss
because he has gambled them away at "neevie-neevie-nick-nack,"--and
similar figures abound in his tales,--are all creations which make one
laugh inwardly as we read. But he has a much higher humour still, that
inimitable power of shading off ignorance into knowledge and
simplicity into wisdom, which makes his picture of Jeanie Deans, for
instance, so humorous as well as so affecting. When Jeanie reunites
her father to her husband by reminding the former how it would
sometimes happen that "twa precious saints might pu' sundrywise like
twa cows riving at the same hayband," she gives us an admirable
instance of Scott's higher humour. Or take Jeanie Deans's letter to
her father communicating to him the pardon of his daughter and her own
interview with the Queen:--
"DEAREST AND TRULY HONOURED FATHER.--This comes
with my duty to inform you, that it has pleased God to
redeem that captivitie of my poor sister, in respect the
Queen's blessed Majesty, for whom we are ever bound to pray,
hath redeemed her soul from the slayer, granting the ransom
of her, whilk is ane pardon or reprieve. And I spoke with
the Queen face to face, and yet live; for she is not muckle
differing from other grand leddies, saving that she has a
stately presence, and een like a blue huntin' hawk's, whilk
gaed throu' and throu' me like a Highland durk--And all this
good was, alway under the Great Giver, to whom all are but
instruments, wrought for us by the Duk of Argile, wha is ane
native true-hearted Scotsman, and not pridefu', like other
folk we ken of--and likewise skeely enow in bestial, whereof
he has promised to gie me twa Devonshire kye, of which he is
enamoured, although I do still haud by the real hawkit
Airshire breed--and I have promised him a cheese; and I wad
wuss ye, if Gowans, the brockit cow, has a quey, that she
suld suck her fill of milk, as I am given to understand he
has none of that breed, and is not scornfu' but will take a
thing frae a puir body, that it may lighten their heart of
the loading of debt that they awe him. Also his honour the
Duke will accept ane of our Dunlop cheeses, and it sall be
my faut if a better was ever yearned in Lowden."--[Here
follow some observations respecting the breed of cattle, and
the produce of the dairy, which it is our intention to
forward to the Board of Agriculture.]--"Nevertheless, these
are but matters of the after-harvest, in respect of the
great good which Providence hath gifted us with--and, in
especial, poor Effie's life. And oh, my dear father, since
it hath pleased God to be merciful to her, let her not want
your free pardon, whilk will make her meet to be ane vessel
of grace, and also a comfort to your ain graie hairs. Dear
Father, will ye let the Laird ken that we have had friends
strangely raised up to us, and that the talent whilk he lent
me will be thankfully repaid. I hae some of it to the fore;
and the rest of it is not knotted up in ane purse or napkin,
but in ane wee bit paper, as is the fashion heir, whilk I am
assured is gude for the siller. And, dear father, through
Mr. Butler's means I hae gude friendship with the Duke, for
there had been kindness between their forbears in the auld
troublesome time byepast. And Mrs. Glass has been kind like
my very mother. She has a braw house here, and lives bien
and warm, wi' twa servant lasses, and a man and a callant in
the shop. And she is to send you doun a pound of her
hie-dried, and some other tobaka, and we maun think of some
propine for her, since her kindness hath been great. And the
Duk is to send the pardon doun by an express messenger, in
respect that I canna travel sae fast; and I am to come doun
wi' twa of his Honour's servants--that is, John Archibald, a
decent elderly gentleman, that says he has seen you lang
syne, when ye were buying beasts in the west frae the Laird
of Aughtermuggitie--but maybe ye winna mind him--ony way,
he's a civil man--and Mrs. Dolly Dutton, that is to be
dairy-maid at Inverara: and they bring me on as far as
Glasgo', whilk will make it nae pinch to win hame, whilk I
desire of all things. May the Giver of all good things keep
ye in your outgauns and incomings, whereof devoutly prayeth
your loving dauter,
"JEAN DEANS."
This contains an example of Scott's rather heavy jocularity as well as
giving us a fine illustration of his highest and deepest and sunniest
humour. Coming where it does, the joke inserted about the Board of
Agriculture is rather like the gambol of a rhinoceros trying to
imitate the curvettings of a thoroughbred horse.
Some of the finest touches of his humour are no doubt much heightened
by his perfect command of the genius as well as the dialect of a
peasantry, in whom a true culture of mind and sometimes also of heart
is found in the closest possible contact with the humblest pursuits
and the quaintest enthusiasm for them. But Scott, with all his turn
for irony--and Mr. Lockhart says that even on his death-bed he used
towards his children the same sort of good-humoured irony to which he
had always accustomed them in his life--certainly never gives us any
example of that highest irony which is found so frequently in
Shakespeare, which touches the paradoxes of the spiritual life of the
children of earth, and which reached its highest point in Isaiah. Now
and then in his latest diaries--the diaries written in his deep
affliction--he comes near the edge of it. Once, for instance, he says,
"What a strange scene if the surge of conversation could suddenly ebb
like the tide, and show us the state of people's real minds!
'No eyes the rocks discover
Which lurk beneath the deep.'
Life could not be endured were it seen in reality." But this is not
irony, only the sort of meditation which, in a mind inclined to thrust
deep into the secrets of life's paradoxes, is apt to lead to irony.
Scott, however, does not thrust deep in this direction. He met the
cold steel which inflicts the deepest interior wounds, like a soldier,
and never seems to have meditated on the higher paradoxes of life till
reason reeled. The irony of Hamlet is far from Scott. His imagination
was essentially one of distinct embodiment. He never even seemed so
much as to contemplate that sundering of substance and form, that
rending away of outward garments, that unclothing of the soul, in
order that it might be more effectually clothed upon, which is at the
heart of anything that may be called spiritual irony. The constant
abiding of his mind within the well-defined forms of some one or other
of the conditions of outward life and manners, among the scores of
different spheres of human habit, was, no doubt, one of the secrets of
his genius; but it was also its greatest limitation.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 32: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, iv. 171-3.]
[Footnote 33: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, iv. 175-6.]
[Footnote 34: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, iv. 46.]
[Footnote 35: Carlyle's _Miscellaneous Essays_, iv. 174-5.]