SCOTT AND MISS AUSTEN
In 1816 Sir Thomas Bernard, baronet, barrister, and philanthropist,
published, having it is said written it three years previously, an
agreeable dialogue on _Old Age_, which was very popular, and reached its
fifth edition in 1820. The interlocutors are Bishops Hough and Gibson
and Mr. Lyttleton, the supposed time 1740--the year, by accident or
design, of _Pamela_. In this the aged and revered "martyr of Magdalen"
is mildly reproached by his brother prelate for liking novels. Hough
puts off the reproach as mildly, and in a most academic manner, by
saying that he only admits them _speciali gratiâ_. This was in fact the
general attitude to the whole kind, not merely in 1740, but after all
the work of nearly another life-time as long as Hough's--almost in 1816
itself. Yet when Sir Thomas published his little book, notice to quit,
of a double kind, had been served on this fallacy. Miss Austen's life
was nearly done, and some of her best work had not been published: but
the greater part had. Scott was in his actual hey-day. Between them,
they had dealt and were dealing--from curiously different sides and in
as curiously different manners--the death-blow to the notion that the
novel was an inferior if not actually discreditable kind, suitable for
weak intellects only, and likely to weaken strong ones, frivolous when
not positively immoral, giving a distaste for serious reading, implying
in the writer an inability to do anything more serious, and generally
presenting a glaring contrast to real "literature."
Interesting as each of these two great novelists is individually, the
interest of the pair, from our present historical point of view, is
almost greater; and the way in which they complete each other is hardly
short of uncanny. Before their time, despite the great examples of prose
fiction produced by Bunyan, Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and
Sterne, and the remarkable determination towards the life of ordinary
society given, or instanced, by Miss Burney; despite the immense
novel-production of the last half of the eighteenth century and the
first decade of the nineteenth--it is hardly too much to say that "the
novel," as such, had not found its proper way or ways at all. Bunyan's
was an example of genius in a peculiar kind of the novel: as, in a very
different one, was Sterne's. Defoe, possessing some of the rarest gifts
of the novelist, was quite lacking in others. Richardson was not only
_exemplar vitiis imitabile_ and _imitatum_, but it might be doubted
whether, even when not faulty, he was not more admirable than
delightful. Smollett, like Defoe, was not much more than part of a
novelist: and Miss Burney lacked strength, equality, and range. There
remained Fielding: and it certainly is not here that any restrictions or
allowances will be insinuated as to Fielding's praise. But Fielding's
novels are a circle in which no one else save Thackeray has ever been
able to walk. And what we are looking for now is something rather
different from this--a masterpiece, or masterpieces, which may not only
yield delight and excite admiration in itself or themselves, but may
bring forth fruit in others--fruit less masterly perhaps, but of the
same or a similar kind. In other words, nobody's work yet--save in the
special kinds--had been capable of yielding a novel-_formula_: nobody
had hit upon the most capital and fruitful novel-ideas. And nearly
everybody had, in the kind, done work curiously and almost
incomprehensibly faulty. Of these faults, the worst, perhaps, were
classable under the general head of inverisimilitude. Want of truth to
nature in character and dialogue, extravagant and clumsy plotting,
neglect of (indeed entire blindness to) historic colour, unreal and
unobserved description--all these things might be raised to a height or
sunk to a bathos in the work of the Minerva Press--but there was far too
much of them in _all_ the novel work of these sixty or seventy years.
Although the facts and dates are well enough known, it is perhaps not
always remembered that Miss Austen, while representing what may, using a
rather objectionable and ambiguous word, be called a more "modern" style
of novel than Scott's, began long before him and had almost finished her
work before his really began. If that wonderful Bath bookseller had not
kept _Northanger Abbey_ in a drawer, instead of publishing it, it would
have had nearly twenty years start of _Waverley_. And it must be
remembered that _Northanger Abbey_, though it is, perhaps, chiefly
thought of as a parody-satire on the school of Mrs. Radcliffe, is, as
these parody-satires have a habit of being, a great deal more. If
Catherine had not made a fool of herself about the _Orphan of the Black
Forest_ and _Horrid Mysteries_ (or rather if everything relating to this
were "blacked out" as by a Russian censor) there would still remain the
admirable framework of her presentation at Bath and her intercourse with
the Tilneys; the more admirable character-sketches of herself--the
triumph of the ordinary made not ordinary--and the Thorpes; the most
admirable flashes of satire and knowledge of human nature, not
"promiscuous" or thrown out _apropos_ of things in general, but acting
as assistants and invigorators to the story.
In the few words just used lies, as far as it can be comprehended in any
few words, the secret both of Miss Austen and of Scott. It has been
said--more than once or twice, I fear--that hardly until Bunyan and
Defoe do we get an interesting story--something that grasps us and
carries us away with it--at all. Except in the great eighteenth-century
Four the experience is not repeated, save in parts of Miss Burney and
Miss Edgeworth later--it is simulated rather than actually brought about
by the Terror-novel--except in the eternal exception of _Vathek_--for
Maturin did not do his best work till much later. The absence of it is
mainly due to a concatenation of inabilities on the part of the writers.
They don't know what they ought to do: and in a certain sense it may
even be said that they don't know what they are doing. In the worst
examples surveyed in the last chapter, such as _A Peep at Our
Ancestors_, this ignorance plumbs the abyss--blocks of dull serious
narrative, almost or quite without action, and occasional insertions of
flat, insipid, and (to any one with a little knowledge) impossible
conversation, forming their staple. Of the better class of books, from
the _Female Quixote_ to _Discipline_, this cannot fairly be said: but
there is always something wanting. Frequently, as in both the books just
mentioned, the writer is too serious and too desirous to instruct.
Hardly ever is there a real _projection_ of character, in the round and
living--only pale, sketchy "academies" that neither live, nor move, nor
have any but a fitful and partial being. The conversation is, perhaps,
the worst feature of all--for it follows the contemporary stage in
adopting a conventional lingo which, as we know from private letters as
early as Gray's and Walpole's, if not even as Chesterfield's and those
of men and women older still, was _not_ the language of well-bred,
well-educated, and intelligent persons at any time during the century.
As for the Fourth Estate of the novel--description--it had rarely been
attempted even by the great masters. In fact it has been pointed out as
perhaps the one unquestionable merit of Mrs. Radcliffe that--following
the taste for the picturesque which, starting from Gray and popularised
by Gilpin, was spreading over the country--she did attempt to introduce
this important feature, and did partly, in a rococo way, succeed in
introducing it. As for plot, that has never been our strong point--we
seem to have been contented with _Tom Jones_ as payment in full of that
demand.[17]
[17] The frankness of the ingenious creator of Mr. Jorrocks
should be imitated by 99 per cent. of English novelists. "The
following story," says he of _Ask Mamma_, "does not involve the
complication of a plot. It is a mere continuous narrative."
Now, this was all changed. It is doubtful whether if _Northanger Abbey_
had actually appeared in 1796 it would have been appreciated--Miss
Austen, like other writers of genius, had, not exactly as the common but
incorrect phrase goes, to create the taste for her own work, but to
arouse the long dormant appetite which she was born to satisfy. Yet,
looking back a hundred years, it seems impossible that anybody of wits
should have failed at once to discover the range, the perfection, and
the variety of the new gift, or set of gifts. Here all the elements come
in: and something with them that enlivens and intensifies them all. The
plot is not intricate, but there is a plot--good deal more, perhaps,
than is generally noticed, and more than Miss Austen herself sometimes
gave, as, for instance, in _Mansfield Park_. It is even rather artfully
worked out--the selfish gabble of John Thorpe, who may look to
superficial observers like a mere outsider, playing an important part
_twice_ in the evolution. There is not lavish but amply sufficient
description and scenery--the Bath vignettes, especially the Beechencliff
prospect; the sketch of the Abbey itself and of Henry's parsonage, etc.
But it is in the other two constituents that the blowing of the new wind
of the spirit is most perceptible. The character-drawing is simply
wonderful, especially in the women--though the men lack nothing. John
Thorpe has been glanced at--there had been nothing like him before, save
in Fielding and in the very best of the essayists and dramatists.
General Tilney has been found fault with as unnatural and excessive: but
only by people who do not know what "harbitrary gents" fathers of
families, who were not only squires and members of parliament, but
military men, could be in the eighteenth century--and perhaps a little
later. His son Henry, in common with most of his author's _jeunes
premiers_, has been similarly objected to as colourless. He really has a
great deal of subdued individuality, and it _had_ to be subdued, because
it would not have done to let him be too superior to Catherine. James
Morland and Frederick Tilney are not to be counted as more than "walking
gentlemen," Mr. Allen only as a little more: and they fulfil their law.
But Isabella Thorpe is almost better than her brother, as being nearer
to pure comedy and further from farce; Eleanor Tilney is adequate; and
Mrs. Allen is sublime on her scale. A novelist who, at the end of the
eighteenth century, could do Mrs. Allen, could do anything that she
chose to do; and might be trusted never to attempt anything that she
could not achieve. And yet the heroine is perhaps--as she ought to
be--the greatest triumph of the whole, and the most indicative of the
new method. The older heroines had generally tried to be extraordinary:
and had failed. Catherine tries to be ordinary: and is an extraordinary
success. She is pretty, but not beautiful: sensible and well-natured,
but capable, like most of us, of making a complete fool of herself and
of doing complete injustice to other people; fairly well educated, but
not in the least learned or accomplished. In real life she would be
simply a unit in the thousands of quite nice but ordinary girls whom
Providence providentially provides in order that mankind shall not be
alone. In literature she is more precious than rubies--exactly because
art has so masterfully followed and duplicated nature.
Precisely to what extent the attractive quality of this art is enhanced
by the pervading irony of the treatment would be a very difficult
problem to work out. It is scarcely hazardous to say that irony is the
very salt of the novel: and that just as you put salt even in a cake, so
it is not wise to neglect it wholly even in a romance. Life itself, as
soon as it gets beyond mere vegetation, is notoriously full of irony:
and no imitation of it which dispenses with the seasoning can be worth
much. That Miss Austen's irony is consummate can hardly be said to be
matter of serious contest.
It has sometimes been thought--perhaps mistakenly--that the exhibition
of it in _Northanger Abbey_ is, though a very creditable essay, _not_
consummate. But _Pride and Prejudice_ is known to be, in part, little if
at all later than _Northanger Abbey_: and there can again be very little
dispute among judges in any way competent as to the quality of the irony
there. Nor does it much matter what part of this wonderful book was
written later and what earlier: for its ironical character is
all-pervading, in almost every character, except Jane and her lover who
are mere foils to Elizabeth and Darcy, and even in these to some extent;
and in the whole story, even in the at least permitted suggestion that
the sight of Pemberley, and Darcy's altered demeanour, had something to
do with Elizabeth's resignation of the old romantic part of _Belle dame
sans merci_. It may further be admitted, even by those who protest
against the undervaluation of _Northanger Abbey_, that _Pride and
Prejudice_ flies higher, and maintains its flight triumphantly. It is
not only longer; it is not only quite independent of parody or contrast
with something previous; but it is far more intricate and elaborate as
well as more original. Elizabeth herself is not merely an ordinary girl:
and the putting forward of her, as an extraordinary yet in no single
point unnatural one, is victoriously carried out. Her father, in spite
of (nay, perhaps, including) his comparative collapse when he is called
upon, not as before to talk but to act, in the business of Lydia's
flight, is a masterpiece. Mr. Collins is, once more by common consent of
the competent, unsurpassed, if not peerless: those who think him
unnatural simply do not know nature. Shakespeare and Fielding were the
only predecessors who could properly serve as sponsors to "this young
lady" (as Scott delightfully calls her) on her introduction among the
immortals on the strength of this character alone. Lady Catherine is not
much the inferior (it would have been pleasing to tell her so) of her
_protégé_ and chaplain. Of almost all the characters, and of quite the
whole book, it is scarcely extravagant to say that it could not have
been better on its own scale and scheme--that it is difficult to
conceive any scheme and scale on which it could have been better. And,
yet once more, there is nothing out of the way in it--the only thing not
of absolutely everyday occurrence, the elopement of Lydia, happens on
so many days still, with slight variations, that it can hardly be called
a licence.
The same qualities appear throughout the other books, whether in more or
less quintessence and with less or more alloy is a question rather of
individual taste than for general or final critical decision. _Sense and
Sensibility_, the first actually to appear (1811), is believed to have
been written about the same time as _Pride and Prejudice_, which
appeared two years later, and _Northanger Abbey_, which did not see the
light till its author was dead. It is the weakest of the three--perhaps
it is the weakest of all: but the weakness is due rather to an error of
judgment than to a lack of power. Like _Northanger Abbey_ it has a
certain dependence on something else: the extravagances of Marianne
satirise the Sensibility-novel just as those of Catherine do the
Terror-story of the immediate past. But it is on a much larger scale:
and things of the kind are better in miniature. Moreover, the author's
sense of creative faculty made her try to throw up and contrast her
heroine with other characters, in a way which she had not attempted in
_Northanger Abbey_: and good as these are in themselves, they make a
less perfect whole. Indeed, in the order of thought, _Sense and
Sensibility_ is the "youngest" of the novels--the least self-criticised.
Nothing in it shows lack of power (John Dashwood and his wife are of the
first order); a good deal in it shows lack of knowledge exactly how to
direct that power.
_Mansfield Park_ (1814), though hardly as brilliant as _Pride and
Prejudice_, shows much more maturity than _Sense and Sensibility_. Much
of it is quite consummate, the character of Mrs. Norris especially: and
for subtly interwoven phrase without emphasis, conveying knowledge and
criticism of life, it has few equals. But it has an elopement. _Emma_,
which has perhaps on the whole been the most general favourite, may
challenge that position on one ground beyond all question, though
possibly not on all. It is the absolute triumph of that reliance on the
strictly ordinary which has been indicated as Miss Austen's title to
pre-eminence in the history of the novel. Not an event, not a
circumstance, not a detail, is carried out of "the daily round, the
common task" of average English middle-class humanity, upper and lower.
Yet every event, every circumstance, every detail, is put _sub specie
eternitatis_ by the sorcery of art. Few things could be more
terrible--nothing more tiresome--than to hear the garrulous Miss Bates
talk in actual life; few things are more delightful than to read her
speeches as they occur here. An aspiring soul might feel disposed to
"take and drown itself in a pail" (as one of Dickens's characters says)
if it had to live the life which the inhabitants of Highbury are
represented as living; to read about that life--to read about it over
and over again--has been and is always likely to be one of the chosen
delights of some of the best wits of our race. This is one of the
paradoxes of art: and perhaps it is the most wonderful of them,
exceeding even the old "pity and terror" problem. And the discovery of
it, as a possible source of artistic success, is one of the greatest
triumphs and one of the most inexhaustible discoveries of that art
itself. For by another paradox--this time not of art but of nature--the
extraordinary is exhaustible and the ordinary is not. Tragedy and the
more "incidented" comedy, it is well known, run into types and reproduce
situations almost inevitably. "All the stories are told." But the story
of the life of Highbury never can be told, because there is really
nothing in it but the telling: and here the blessed infinity of Art
comes in again.
Miss Austen's last book, like her first, was published posthumously and
she left nothing else but a couple of fragments. One of these, _Lady
Susan_, does not, so far as it extends, promise much, though it is such
a fragment and such an evident first draft even of this, that judgment
of it is equally unfair and futile. The other, _The Watsons_, has some
very striking touches, but is also a mere beginning. _Persuasion_--which
appeared with _Northanger Abbey_ and which, curiously enough, has, like
its nearly twenty years elder sister, Bath for its principal scene--has
also some pretensions to primacy among the books, and is universally
admitted to be of its author's most delicate, most finished, and most
sustained work. And this, like _Emma_, resolutely abstains from even the
slightest infusion of startling or unusual incident, of "exciting"
story, of glaring colour of any kind: relying only on congruity of
speech, sufficient if subdued description, and above all a profusion of
the most delicately, but the most vividly drawn character, made to
unfold a plot which has interest, if no excitement, and seasoned
throughout with the unfailing condiment--the author's "own sauce"--of
gentle but piquant irony and satire.
It is not to be supposed or inferred that Miss Austen's methods, or her
results, have appealed to everybody. Madame de Staël thought her
_vulgaire_--meaning, of course, not exactly our "vulgar" but
"commonplace"; Charlotte Brontë was not much otherwise minded; her own
Marianne Dashwood would doubtless have thought the same. Readers without
some touch of letters may think her style old-fashioned: it has even
been termed "stilted." Not merely may amateurs of blood and thunder, of
passion and sensation, think her tame, but the more modern devotees of
"analysis" may consider her superficial. On the other hand, it is
notorious that, from her own day to this, she has never wanted
partisans, often of superlative competence, and of the most strikingly
different tempers, tastes, and opinions. The extraordinary quietness of
her art is only matched by its confidence: its subtlety by its strength.
She did not try many styles; she deliberately and no doubt wisely
refused to try the other style which was already carrying all before it
in her own later days. She seems to have confined herself (with what
seems to some high-flying judges an almost ignoble caution) to the
strata of society that she knew most thoroughly: and the curious have
noted that she seldom goes above a baronet, and hardly even descends to
a butler, in her range of personages who are not mere mutes. It is not
at all unlikely--in fact it is almost certain--that she might have
enlarged this range, and that of her incident, with perfect safety and
to the great profit and delight of her readers. But these actual things
she knew she could do consummately; and she would not risk the
production of anything not consummate.
The value of her, artistically, is of course in the perfection of what
she did; but the value of her historically is in the way in which she
showed that, given the treatment, any material could be perfected. It
was in this way, as has been pointed out, that the possibilities of the
novel were shown to be practically illimitable. Tragedy is not needed:
and the most ordinary transactions, the most everyday characters,
develop into an infinite series of comedies with which the novelist can
amuse himself and his readers. The _ludicrum humani seculi_ on the one
hand, and the artist's power of extracting and arranging it on the
other--these two things supply all that is wanted. This Hampshire
parson's daughter had found the philosopher's stone of the novel: and
the very pots and pans, the tongs and pokers of the house, could be
turned into novel-gold by it.
But even gold is not everything: and only a fanatic, and a rather
foolish fanatic, would say that this style of fiction summed up and
exhausted all the good that fiction could give and do. Miss Austen's art
excludes (it has been said) tragedy; it does not let in much pure
romance; although its variety is in a way infinite, yet it is not
various in infinite ways, but rather in very finite ones. Everybody who
denies its excellence is to be blamed: but nobody is to be blamed for
saying that he should like some other excellences as well. The desire is
innocent, nay commendable: and it was being satisfied, at practically
the same time, by the work of Sir Walter Scott in a kind of novel almost
as new (when we regard it in connection with its earlier examples) as
Miss Austen's own. This was the Historical novel, which, in a way, not
only subsumed many though not quite all varieties of Romance, but also
summoned to its aid not a little--in fact a very great deal--of the
methods of the pure novel itself.
It is not very long since a critic, probably not very old, sentenced the
critical opinions of another critic, certainly not very young, to "go
into the melting pot" because they were in favour of the historical
novel: and because the historical novel had for some time past done
great harm (I think the phrase was stronger) to the imaginative
literature of England. Now there are several things which might be said
about this judgment--I do not say "in arrest" of it, because it is of
itself inoperative: as it happens you cannot put critical opinions in
the melting pot. At least, they won't melt: and they come out again
like the diabolic rat that Mr. Chips tried to pitch-boil. In the first
place, there is the question whether the greater part by far of the
imaginative and other literature of _any_ time does not itself "go into
the melting pot," and whether it much matters what sends it there. In
the second, if this seems too cynical, there is the very large and grave
question whether a still larger proportion of the novel of manners, in
England, France, and all other countries during the same time, has not
been as bad as, or worse than, the romantic division, historical or
other. But the worst faults of the judgment remain. In the first place
there is the fatal shortness of view. It is with the literature of two
thousand, not with the literature of twenty, years that the true critic
has to do: and no kind which--in two thousand, or two hundred, or
twenty--has produced literature that is good or great can be even
temporarily put aside because (as every kind of literature without
exception has been again and again) it is for a time barren or fruitful
only in weeds. And any one who does not count Scott and Dumas and
Thackeray among the makers of good literature must really excuse others
if they simply take no further count of him. The historical novel is a
good kind, good friends, a marvellous good kind: and it has the
advantage over the pure novel of manners that it is much less subject to
obsolescence, if it be really well done; while it can practically annex
most of the virtues of that novel of manners itself.
This excellent kind, however, had been wandering about in the
wilderness--had indeed hardly got so far even as that stage, but had
been a mere "bodiless childful of life in the gloom"--for more than two
thousand years before _Waverley_. Of its earlier attempts to get into
full existence we cannot say much here:[18] something on the more
recent but rather abortive birth-throes has been promised, and is now
due. It is not improbable that considerable assistance was rendered to
the kind by the heroic romance of the seventeenth century in prose and
verse, which often attempted historic, and almost always
pseudo-historic, guise. As has been seen in regard to such collections
as Croxall's, historical stories were freely mingled with fictitious:
and it could not be for nothing that Horace Walpole, the author of the
_Castle of Otranto_, was a rather ardent and even to some extent
scholarly student of the romance and the gossip of history. Much
earlier, Fielding himself, in his salad days, had given something of an
historic turn to the story of _A Journey from this World to the Next_.
And when history itself became more common and more readable, it could
not but be that this inexhaustible source of material for the new kind
of literature, which was being so eagerly demanded and so busily
supplied, should suggest itself. Some instances of late eighteenth and
early nineteenth century experiments have been given and discussed in
the last chapter: and when Scott (or "the Author of _Waverley_") had
achieved his astonishing success, some of the writers of these put in
the usual claim of "That's _my_ thunder." This was done in the case of
the Lees, it was also done in the case of Jane Porter, the writer of
the once famous and favourite _Thaddeus of Warsaw_ (1803) and _Scottish
Chiefs_ (1810): while, as we have seen, there had been historical colour
enough in Godwin's novels to make suggestion of _his_ "authorship of
_Waverley_" not absolutely preposterous. Even Mrs. Radcliffe had touched
the style; and humbler persons like the egregious Henrietta Mosse had
attempted it in the most serious spirit.
[18] Those who are curious about the matter will find it
treated in a set of Essays by the present writer, which
originally appeared in _Macmillan's Magazine_ during the autumn
of 1894, and were reprinted among _Essays in English
Literature_, Second Series, London, 1895.
But with their varying degrees of talent--with, in one or two cases,
even a little genius--all these writers had broken themselves upon one
fatal difficulty--that of anachronism: not in the petty sense of the
pedant, but in the wide one of the critic. The present writer is not
prepared, without reading _A Peep at Our Ancestors_ again (which he
distinctly declines to do), to say that there are, in that remarkable
performance, any positive errors of historic fact worse than, or as bad,
as those which pedantry has pointed out in _Ivanhoe_. But whereas you
may be nearly as well acquainted with the actual history of the time as
the pedants themselves, and a great deal better acquainted with its
literature, and yet never be shocked, disgusted, or contemptuously
amused in _Ivanhoe_ by such things as were quoted from the _Peep_ a few
pages back--so, to those who know something of "the old Elizabeth way,"
and even nowadays to those who know very little, and that little at
second hand, Miss Lee's travesty of it in _The Recess_ is impossible and
intolerable. When Mrs. Radcliffe, at the date definitely given of 1584,
talks about "the Parisian opera," represents a French girl of the
sixteenth century as being "instructed in the English poets," and talks
about driving in a "landau," the individual blunders are, perhaps, not
more violent than those of the chronology by which Scott's Ulrica is
apparently a girl at the time of the Conquest and a woman, not too old
to be the object of rivalry between Front de Boeuf and his father, not
long before the reign of Richard I. But this last oversight does not
affect the credibility of the story, or the homogeneity of the manners,
in the least. Mrs. Radcliffe jumbles up two (or more than two) utterly
different states and stages of society, manners, and other things which
constitute the very atmosphere of the story itself. Perhaps (we have
very few easy conversations of the period to justify a positive
statement) a real Bois-Guilbert and still more a real Wamba might not
have talked exactly like Scott's personages: but there is no insistent
and disturbing reason why they should not. When we hear an Adelaise of
the mid-twelfth century asking whether she does not receive her
education from her mamma, the necessary "suspension of disbelief"
becomes impossible.
But these now most obvious truths were not obvious at all between 1780
and 1810: and it is perhaps the greatest evidence of Scott's genius that
half, but by no means quite, unconsciously he saw them, and that he has
made everybody see them since. It was undoubtedly fortunate that he
began novel-writing so late: for earlier even he might have been caught
in the errors of the time. But when he did begin, he had not only
reached middle life and matured his considerable original critical
faculty--criticism and wine are the only things that even the "kind calm
years" may be absolutely trusted to improve if there is any original
goodness in them--but he had other advantages. He had read, if not with
minute accuracy, very widely indeed: and he possessed, as Lord Morley
has well said, "the genius of history" in a degree which perhaps no
merely meticulous scholar has ever reached, and which was not exceeded
in _quality_ even by the greatest historians such as Gibbon. He had an
almost unmatched combination of common sense with poetic imagination, of
knowledge of the world with knowledge of letters. He had shown himself
to be possessed of the secret of semi-historical narrative itself in
half a dozen remarkable verse romances, and therefore had less to do in
engineering the prose romance. Last of all, he had seen what to
avoid--not merely in his editing of Strutt's _Queenhoo Hall_ (a valuable
property-room for the novel, but nothing of a real novel), but in his
reading of the failures of his predecessors and contemporaries. The very
beginning of _Waverley_ itself (which most people skip) is invaluable,
because it shows us that at the time he wrote it (which, it need hardly
be said, was a long time before its completion) he had not the knowledge
or the courage to strike straight out into the stream of action and
conversation, but troubled himself with accumulating bladders and
arranging ropes for the possible salvation of his narrative if it got
into difficulties. Very soon he knew that it would not get into
difficulties: and away he went.
It ought not to be necessary, but from some symptoms it may be
desirable, to point out that Scott is very far from being an historical
novelist only. An acute French critic, well acquainted with both
literatures, once went so far as to say that there were a good many
professed "philosophical" novels which did not contain such keen
psychology as Scott's: and I would undertake to show a good deal of
cause on this side. But short of it, it is undeniable that he can do
perfectly well without any historical scaffolding. There is practically
nothing of it in his second and third novels, _Guy Mannering_ and _The
Antiquary_, each of which good judges have sometimes ranked as his very
best: there is as little or less in _St. Ronan's Well_, a very fine
thing as it is, and one which, but for James Ballantyne's meddling folly
and prudery, would have been much finer. The incomparable little
conversation--scenes and character-sketches scattered among the
Introductions to the novels--especially the history of Crystal
Croftangry--show that he could perfectly well have dispensed with all
out-of-the-way incident had he chosen. But, as a rule, he did not so
choose: and, in the majority of cases, he preferred to take his
out-of-the-way incident from historical sources. Not here,
unfortunately, can we allow ourselves even a space proportionate to that
given above in Miss Austen's case to the criticism of individual novels:
but luckily there is not much need of this. The brilliant overture of
_Waverley_ as such, with its entirely novel combination of the
historical and the "national" elements upon the still more novel
background of Highland scenery; the equally vivid and vigorous narrative
and the more interesting personages of _Old Mortality_ and _Rob Roy_;
the domestic tragedy, with the historical element for little more than a
framework, of the _Heart of Midlothian_ and the _Bride of Lammermoor_;
the little masterpiece of _A Legend of Montrose_; the fresh departure,
with purely English subject, of _Ivanhoe_ and its triumphant sequels in
_Kenilworth, Quentin Durward_, and others; the striking utilisation of
literary assistance in the _Fortunes of Nigel_; and the wonderful
blending of autobiographic, historical, and romantic interest in
_Redgauntlet_:--one cannot dwell on these and other things. The magic
continued even in _Woodstock_--written as this was almost between the
blows of the executioner's crow-bar on the wheel, in the tightening of
the windlasses at the rack--it is not absent, whatever people may say,
in _Anne of Geierstein_, nor even quite lacking in the better parts of
_Count Robert of Paris_. But we must not expatiate on its effects; we
must only give a little attention to the means by which they are
achieved.
Another of the common errors about Scott is to represent--perhaps really
to regard--him as a hit-or-miss and hand-to-mouth _improvisatore_, who
bundled out his creations anyhow, and did not himself know how he
created them. The fallacy is worse than a fallacy: for it is down-right
false witness. We have numerous passages in and out of the novels--the
chief of them being the remarkable conversation with Captain Clutterbuck
in the Introduction to the _Fortunes of Nigel_ and the reflections in
the _Diary_ on _Sir John Chiverton_ and _Brambletye House_--showing that
Scott knew perfectly well the construction and the stringing of his
fiddle, as well as the trick of applying his rosin. But if we had not
these direct testimonies, no one of any critical faculty could mistake
the presence of consciously perceived principles in the books
themselves. A man does not suddenly, and by mere blind instinct, avoid
such a pitfall as that of incongruous speech and manners, which has been
noticed above. It is not mere happy-go-lucky blundering which makes him
invariably decline another into which people still fall--the selection
of historical personages of the first importance, and elaborately known,
for the _central_ figures of his novels. Not to believe in luck is a
mark of perhaps greater folly than to over-believe in it: but luck will
not always keep a man clear of such perils as that unskilful wedging of
great blocks of mere history into his story, which the lesser historical
novelists always commit, or that preponderance of mere narrative itself
as compared with action and conversation from which even Dumas, even
Thackeray, is not free.
That he knew what he was doing and what he had to do is thus certain;
that he did it to an astounding extent is still more certain; but it
would not skill much to deny that he did not always give himself time to
do it perfectly in every respect, though it is perhaps not mere paradox
or mere partisanship to suggest that if he had given himself more time,
he would hardly have done better, and might have done worse. The
accusation of superficiality has been _already_ glanced at: and it is
pretty certain that it argues more superficiality, of a much more
hopeless kind, in those who make it. The accusation of careless and
slovenly style is not much better: for Scott had, perfectly, the style
suited to his own work, and you cannot easily have a better style than
that. But there are two defects in him which were early detected by good
and friendly judges: and which are in fact natural results of the
extraordinary force and fertility of his creative power. One--the less
serious, but certainly to some extent a fault in art and a point in
which he is distinguished for the worse from Shakespeare--is that he is
rather given to allow at first, to some of his personages, an
elaborateness and apparent emphasis of drawing which seems to promise an
importance for them in the story that they never actually attain. Mike
Lambourne in _Kenilworth_ is a good example of this: but there are many
others. The fact evidently was that, in the rush of the artist's plastic
imagination, other figures rose and overpowered these. It is an excuse:
but it is hardly a justification. The other and more serious is a
tendency--which grew on him and may no doubt have been encouraged by the
astonishing pecuniary rewards of his work--to hurry his conclusions, to
"huddle up the cards and throw them into the bag," as Lady Louisa Stuart
told him. There is one of the numerous, but it would seem generic and
classifiable, forms of unpleasant dream in which the dreamer's watch, to
his consternation, suddenly begins to send its hands round at double and
ten-fold speed. Scott is rather apt to do this, towards the close of his
novels, in his eagerness to begin something else. These defects,
however, are defects much more from the point of view of abstract
criticism than from that of the pleasure of the reader: while, even from
the former, they are outweighed many times by merits. And as regards our
present method of estimation, they hardly count at all.
For, in that calculus, the important thing is that Scott, like Miss
Austen, at once opened an immense new field to the novelist, and showed
how that field was to be cultivated. The complement-contrast of the pair
can need emphasising only to those on whom no emphasis would be likely
to impress it: but it may not be quite so evident at once that between
them they cover almost the entire possible ground of prose fiction. The
more striking and popular as well as more strictly novel style of Scott
naturally attracted most attention at first: indeed it can hardly be
said that, for the next thirty years, much attempt was made to follow in
Miss Austen's steps, while such attempts as were made were seldom very
good.[19] But there is no need to hurry Time: and he generally knows
what he is about. At any rate he had, in and through these two
provided--for generations, probably for centuries, to come--patterns and
principles for whoso would to follow in prose fiction.
[19] Some work of distinction, actually later than hers in date,
is older in kind. This is the case not only with the later books
of her Irish elder sister. Miss Edgeworth (see last chapter),
but with all those of her Scotch younger one, Miss Ferrier, who
wrote _Marriage_ just after _Sense and Sensibility_ appeared,
but did not publish it (1818) till after Miss Austen's death,
following it with _The Inheritance_ (1824) and _Destiny_ (1831).
Miss Ferrier, who had a strong though rather hard humour and
great faculty of pronounced character-drawing, is better at a
series of sketches than at a complete novel--only _The
Inheritance_ having much central unity. And there is still
eighteenth-century quality rather than nineteenth in her
alternations of Smollettian farce-satire and Mackenziefied
sentiment. She is very good to read, but stand a little out of
the regular historic succession, as well as out of the ordinary
novel classes.