E-text prepared by Al Haines
A HISTORY OF ENGLISH ROMANTICISM IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
by
HENRY A. BEERS
Author of _A Suburban Pastoral_, _The Ways of Yale_, etc.
New York
Henry Holt and Company
1918
ROMANCE
My love dwelt in a Northern land.
A grey tower in a forest green
Was hers, and far on either hand
The long wash of the waves was seen,
And leagues on leagues of yellow sand,
The woven forest boughs between.
And through the silver Northern light
The sunset slowly died away,
And herds of strange deer, lily-white,
Stole forth among the branches grey;
About the coming of the light,
They fled like ghosts before the day.
I know not if the forest green
Still girdles round that castle grey;
I know not if the boughs between
The white deer vanish ere the day;
Above my love the grass is green,
My heart is colder than the clay.
ANDREW LANG.
PREFACE.
The present volume is a sequel to "A History of English Romanticism in
the Eighteenth Century" (New York; Henry Holt & Co., 1899). References
in the footnotes to "Volume I." are to that work. The difficulties of
this second part of my undertaking have been of a kind just opposite to
those of the first. As it concerns my subject, the eighteenth century
was an age of beginnings; and the problem was to discover what latent
romanticism existed in the writings of a period whose spirit, upon the
whole, was distinctly unromantic. But the temper of the nineteenth
century has been, until recent years, prevailingly romantic in the wider
meaning of the word. And as to the more restricted sense in which I have
chosen to employ it, the mediaevalising literature of the nineteenth
century is at least twenty times as great as that of the eighteenth, both
in bulk and in value. Accordingly the problem here is one of selection;
and of selection not from a list of half-forgotten names, like Warton and
Hurd, but from authors whose work is still the daily reading of all
educated readers.
As I had anticipated, objection has been made to the narrowness of my
definition of _romanticism_. But every writer has a right to make his
own definitions; or, at least, to say what his book shall be about. I
have not written a history of the "liberal movement in English
literature"; nor of the "renaissance of wonder"; nor of the "emancipation
of the ego." Why not have called the book, then, "A History of the
Mediaeval Revival in England"? Because I have a clear title to the use
of _romantic_ in one of its commonest acceptations; and, for myself, I
prefer the simple dictionary definition, "pertaining to the style of the
Christian and popular literature of the Middle Ages," to any of those
more pretentious explanations which seek to express the true inwardness
of romantic literature by analysing it into its elements, selecting one
of these elements as essential, and rejecting all the rest as accidental.
M. Brunetière; for instance, identifies romanticism with lyricism. It is
the "emancipation of the ego." This formula is made to fit Victor Hugo,
and it will fit Byron. But M. Brunetière would surely not deny that
Walter Scott's work is objective and dramatic quite as often as it is
lyrical. Yet what Englishman will be satisfied with a definition of
_romantic_ which excludes Scott? Indeed, M. Brunetière himself is
respectful to the traditional meaning of the word. "Numerous
definitions," he says, "have been given of Romanticism, and still others
are continually being offered; and all, or almost all of them, contain a
part of the truth. Mme. de Staël was right when she asserted in her
'Allemagne' that Paganism and Christianity, the North and the South,
antiquity and the Middle Ages, having divided between them the history of
literature, Romanticism in consequence, in contrast to Classicism, was a
combination of chivalry, the Middle Ages, the literatures of the North,
and Christianity. It should be noted, in this connection, that some
thirty years later Heinrich Heine, in the book in which he will rewrite
Mme. de Staël's, will not give such a very different idea of
Romanticism." And if, in an analysis of the romantic movement throughout
Europe, any single element in it can lay claim to the leading place, that
element seems to me to be the return of each country to its national
past; in other words, mediaevalism.
A definition loses its usefulness when it is made to connote too much.
Professor Herford says that the "organising conception" of his "Age of
Wordsworth" is romanticism. But if Cowper and Wordsworth and Shelley are
romantic, then almost all the literature of the years 1798-1830 is
romantic. I prefer to think of Cowper as a naturalist, of Shelley as an
idealist, and of Wordsworth as a transcendental realist, and to reserve
the name romanticist for writers like Scott, Coleridge, and Keats; and I
think the distinction a serviceable one. Again, I have been censured for
omitting Blake from my former volume. The omission was deliberate, not
accidental, and the grounds for it were given in the preface. Blake was
not discovered until rather late in the nineteenth century. He was not a
link in the chain of influence which I was tracing. I am glad to find my
justification in a passage of Mr. Saintsbury's "History of Nineteenth
Century Literature" (p. 13): "Blake exercised on the literary _history_
of his time no influence, and occupied in it no position. . . . The
public had little opportunity of seeing his pictures, and less of reading
his books. . . . He was practically an unread man."
But I hope that this second volume may make more clear the unity of my
design and the limits of my subject. It is scarcely necessary to add
that no absolute estimate is attempted of the writers whose works are
described in this history. They are looked at exclusively from a single
point of view. H. A. B.
APRIL, 1901.
TABLE OF CONTENTS.
CHAPTER
I. WALTER SCOTT
II. COLERIDGE, BOWLES, AND THE POPE CONTROVERSY
III. KEATS, LEIGH HUNT, AND THE DANTE REVIVAL
IV. THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL IN GERMANY
V. THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT IN FRANCE
VI. DIFFUSED ROMANTICISM IN THE LITERATURE OF
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
VII. THE PRE-RAPHAELITES
VIII. TENDENCIES AND RESULTS
A HISTORY OF ENGLISH ROMANTICISM.
CHAPTER I.
Walter Scott.[1]
It was reserved for Walter Scott, "the Ariosto of the North," "the
historiographer royal of feudalism," to accomplish the task which his
eighteenth-century forerunners had essayed in vain. He possessed the
true enchanter's wand, the historic imagination. With this in his hand,
he raised the dead past to life, made it once more conceivable, made it
even actual. Before Scott no genius of the highest order had lent itself
wholly or mainly to retrospection. He is the middle point and the
culmination of English romanticism. His name is, all in all, the most
important on our list. "Towards him all the lines of the romantic
revival converge." [2] The popular ballad, the Gothic romance, the
Ossianic poetry, the new German literature, the Scandinavian discoveries,
these and other scattered rays of influence reach a focus in Scott. It
is true that his delineation of feudal society is not final. There were
sides of mediaeval life which he did not know, or understand, or
sympathize with, and some of these have been painted in by later artists.
That his pictures have a coloring of modern sentiment is no arraignment
of him but of the _genre_. All romanticists are resurrectionists; their
art is an elaborate make-believe. It is enough for their purpose if the
world which they re-create has the look of reality, the _verisimile_ if
not the _verum_. That Scott's genius was _in extenso_ rather than _in
intenso_, that his work is largely improvisation, that he was not a
miniature, but a distemper painter, splashing large canvasses with a
coarse brush and gaudy pigments, all these are commonplaces of criticism.
Scott's handling was broad, vigorous, easy, careless, healthy, free. He
was never subtle, morbid, or fantastic, and had no niceties or secrets.
He was, as Coleridge said of Schiller, "master, not of the intense drama
of passion, but the diffused drama of history." Therefore, because his
qualities were popular and his appeal was made to the people, the general
reader, he won a hearing for his cause, which Coleridge or Keats or
Tieck, with his closer workmanship, could never have won. He first and
he alone _popularised_ romance. No literature dealing with the feudal
past has ever had the currency and the universal success of Scott's. At
no time has mediaevalism held so large a place in comparison with other
literary interests as during the years of his greatest vogue, say from
1805 to 1830.
The first point to be noticed about Scott is the thoroughness of his
equipment. While never a scholar in the academic sense, he was, along
certain chosen lines, a really learned man. He was thirty-four when he
published "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" (1805), the first of his series
of metrical romances and the first of his poems to gain popular favour.
But for twenty years he had been storing his mind with the history,
legends, and ballad poetry of the Scottish border, and was already a
finished antiquarian. The bent and limitations of his genius were early
determined, and it remained to the end wonderfully constant to its
object. At the age of twelve he had begun a collection of manuscript
ballads. His education in romance dated from the cradle. His lullabies
were Jacobite songs; his grandmother told him tales of moss-troopers, and
his Aunt Janet read him ballads from Ramsay's "Tea-table Miscellany,"
upon which his quick and tenacious memory fastened eagerly. The ballad
of "Hardiknute," in this collection, he knew by heart before he could
read. "It was the first poem I ever learnt--the last I shall ever
forget." Dr. Blacklock introduced the young schoolboy to the poems of
Ossian and of Spenser, and he committed to memory "whole duans of the one
and cantos of the other." "Spenser," he says, "I could have read
forever. Too young to trouble myself about the allegory, I considered
all the knights and ladies and dragons and giants in their outward and
exoteric sense, and God only knows how delighted I was to find myself in
such society." A little later Percy's "Reliques" fell into his hands,
with results that have already been described.[3]
As soon as he got access to the circulating library in Edinburgh, he
began to devour its works of fiction, characteristically rejecting love
stories and domestic tales, but laying hold upon "all that was
adventurous and romantic," and in particular upon "everything which
touched on knight-errantry." For two or three years he used to spend his
holidays with his schoolmate, John Irving, on Arthur's Seat or Salisbury
Crags, where they read together books like "The Castle of Otranto" and
the poems of Spenser and Ariosto; or composed and narrated to each other
"interminable tales of battles and enchantments" and "legends in which
the martial and the miraculous always predominated." The education of
Edward Waverley, as described in the third chapter of Scott's first
novel, was confessedly the novelist's own education. In the "large
Gothic room" which was the library of Waverley Honour, the young
book-worm pored over "old historical chronicles" and the writings of
Pulci, Froissart, Brantome, and De la Noue; and became "well acquainted
with Spenser, Drayton, and other poets who have exercised themselves on
romantic fiction--of all themes the most fascinating to a youthful
imagination."
Yet even thus early, a certain solidity was apparent in Scott's studies.
"To the romances and poetry which I chiefly delighted in," he writes, "I
had always added the study of history, especially as connected with
military events." He interested himself, for example, in the art of
fortification; and when confined to his bed by a childish illness, found
amusement in modelling fortresses and "arranging shells and seeds and
pebbles so as to represent encountering armies. . . . I fought my way
thus through Vertot's 'Knights of Malta'--a book which, as it hovered
between history and romance, was exceedingly dear to me."
Every genius is self-educated, and we find Scott from the first making
instinctive selections and rejections among the various kinds of
knowledge offered him. At school he would learn no Greek, and wrote a
theme in which he maintained, to the wrath of his teacher, that Ariosto
was a better poet than Homer. In later life he declared that he had
forgotten even the letters of the Greek alphabet. Latin would have fared
as badly, had not his interest in Matthew Paris and other monkish
chroniclers "kept up a kind of familiarity with the language even in its
rudest state." "To my Gothic ear, the 'Stabat Mater,' the 'Dies
Irae,'[4] and some of the other hymns of the Catholic Church are more
solemn and affecting than the fine classical poetry of Buchanan." In our
examination of Scott's early translations from the German,[5] it has been
noticed how exclusively he was attracted by the romantic department of
that literature, passing over, for instance, Goethe's maturer work, to
fix upon his juvenile drama "Götz von Berlichingen." Similarly he
learned Italian just to read in the original the romantic poets Tasso,
Ariosto, Boiardo, and Pulci. When he first went to London in 1799, "his
great anxiety," reports Lockhart, "was to examine the antiquities of the
Tower and Westminster Abbey, and to make some researches among the MSS.
of the British Museum." From Oxford, which he visited in 1803, he
brought away only "a grand but indistinct picture of towers and chapels
and oriels and vaulted halls", having met there a reception which, as he
modestly acknowledges, "was more than such a truant to the classic page
as myself was entitled to expect at the source of classic learning."
Finally, in his last illness, when sent to Rome to recover from the
effects of a paralytic stroke, his ruling passion was strong in death.
He examined with eagerness the remains of the mediaeval city, but
appeared quite indifferent to that older Rome which speaks to the
classical student. It will be remembered that just the contrary of this
was true of Addison, when he was in Italy a century before.[6] Scott was
at no pains to deny or to justify the one-sidedness of his culture. But
when Erskine remonstrated with him for rambling on
"through brake and maze
With harpers rude, of barbarous days,"
and urged him to compose a regular epic on classical lines, he
good-naturedly but resolutely put aside the advice.
"Nay, Erskine, nay--On the wild hill
Let the wild heath-bell[7] flourish still . . . .
Though wild as cloud, as stream, as gale,
Flow forth, flow unrestrained, my tale!" [8]
Scott's letters to Erskine, Ellis, Leyden, Ritson, Miss Seward, and other
literary correspondents are filled with discussions of antiquarian
questions and the results of his favourite reading in old books and
manuscripts. He communicates his conclusions on the subject of "Arthur
and Merlin" or on the authorship of the old metrical romance of "Sir
Tristram." [9] He has been copying manuscripts in the Advocates' Library
at Edinburgh. In 1791 he read papers before the Speculative Society on
"The Origin of the Feudal System," "The Authenticity of Ossian's Poems,"
"The Origin of the Scandinavian Mythology." Lockhart describes two
note-books in Scott's hand-writing, with the date 1792, containing
memoranda of ancient court records about Walter Scott and his wife, Dame
Janet Beaton, the "Ladye" of Branksome in the "Lay"; extracts from
"Guerin de Montglave"; copies of "Vegtam's Kvitha" and the "Death-Song of
Regner Lodbrog," with Gray's English versions; Cnut's verses on passing
Ely Cathedral; the ancient English "Cuckoo Song," and other rubbish of
the kind.[10] When in 1803 he began to contribute articles to the
_Edinburgh Review_, his chosen topics were such as "Amadis of Gaul,"
Ellis' "Specimens of Ancient English Poetry," Godwin's "Chaucer,"
Sibbald's "Chronicle of Scottish Poetry," Evans' "Old Ballads," Todd's
"Spenser," "The Life and Works of Chatterton," Southey's translation of
"The Cid," etc.
Scott's preparation for the work which he had to do was more than
adequate. His reading along chosen lines was probably more extensive and
minute than any man's of his generation. The introductions and notes to
his poems and novels are even overburdened with learning. But this,
though important, was but the lesser part of his advantage. "The
old-maidenly genius of antiquarianism" could produce a Strutt[11] or even
perhaps a Warton; but it needed the touch of the creative imagination to
turn the dead material of knowledge into works of art that have delighted
millions of readers for a hundred years in all civilised lands and
tongues.
The key to Scott's romanticism is his intense local feeling.[12] That
attachment to place which, in most men, is a sort of animal instinct, was
with him a passion. To set the imagination at work some emotional
stimulus is required. The angry pride of Byron, Shelley's revolt against
authority, Keats' almost painfully acute sensitiveness to beauty,
supplied the nervous irritation which was wanting in Scott's slower,
stronger, and heavier temperament. The needed impetus came to him from
his love of country. Byron and Shelley were torn up by the roots and
flung abroad, but Scott had struck his roots deep into native soil. His
absorption in the past and reverence for everything that was old, his
conservative prejudices and aristocratic ambitions, all had their source
in this feeling. Scott's Toryism was of a different spring from
Wordsworth's and Coleridge's. It was not a reaction from disappointed
radicalism; nor was it the result of reasoned conviction. It was inborn
and was nursed into a sentimental Jacobitism by ancestral traditions and
by an early prepossession in favour of the Stuarts--a Scottish
dynasty--reinforced by encounters with men in the Highlands who had been
out in the '45. It did not interfere with a practical loyalty to the
reigning house and with what seems like a somewhat exaggerated deference
to George IV. Personally the most modest of men, he was proud to trace
his descent from "auld Wat of Harden" [13] and to claim kinship with the
bold Buccleuch. He used to make annual pilgrimages to Harden Tower, "the
_incunabula_ of his race"; and "in the earlier part of his life," says
Lockhart, "he had nearly availed himself of his kinsman's permission to
fit up the dilapidated _peel_ for his summer residence."
Byron wrote: "I twine my hope of being remembered in my line with my
land's language." But Scott wished to associate his name with the land
itself. Abbotsford was more to him than Newstead could ever have been to
Byron; although Byron was a peer and inherited his domain, while Scott
was a commoner and created his. Too much has been said in condemnation
of Scott's weakness in this respect; that his highest ambition was to
become a _laird_ and found a family; that he was more gratified when the
King made him a baronet than when the public bought his books, that the
expenses of Abbotsford and the hospitalities which he extended to all
comers wasted his time and finally brought about his bankruptcy. Leslie
Stephen and others have even made merry over Scott's Gothic,[14]
comparing his plaster-of-Paris 'scutcheons and ceilings in imitation of
carved oak with the pinchbeck architecture of Strawberry Hill, and
intimating that the feudalism in his romances was only a shade more
genuine than the feudalism of "The Castle of Otranto." Scott was
imprudent; Abbotsford was his weakness, but it was no ignoble weakness.
If the ideal of the life which he proposed to himself there was scarcely
a heroic one, neither was it vulgar or selfish. The artist or the
philosopher should perhaps be superior to the ambition of owning land and
having "a stake in the country," but the ambition is a very human one and
has its good side. In Scott the desire was more social than personal.
It was not that title and territory were feathers in his cap, but that
they bound him more closely to the dear soil of Scotland and to the
national, historic past.
The only deep passion in Scott's poetry is patriotism, the passion of
place. In his metrical romances the rush of the narrative and the vivid,
picturesque beauty of the descriptions are indeed exciting to the
imagination; but it is only when the chord of national feeling is touched
that the verse grows lyrical, that the heart is reached, and that tears
come into the reader's eyes, as they must have done into the poet's. A
dozen such passages occur at once to the memory; the last stand of the
Scottish nobles around their king at Flodden; the view of
Edinburgh--"mine own romantic town "--from Blackford Hill;
"Fitz-Eustace' heart felt closely pent:
As if to give his rapture vent,
The spur he to his charger lent,
And raised his bridle-hand,
And, making demi-volte in air,
Cried, 'Where's the coward that would not dare
To fight for such a land?'"
and the still more familiar opening of the sixth canto in the
"Lay"--"Breathes there the man," etc.:
"O Caledonia! stern and wild,
Meet nurse for a poetic child!
Land of brown heath and shaggy wood,
Land of the mountain and the flood,
Land of my sires! what mortal hand
Can e'er untie the filial band
That knits me to thy rugged strand?"
In such a mood geography becomes poetry and names are music.[15] Scott
said to Washington Irving that if he did not see the heather at least
once a year, he thought he would die.
Lockhart tells how the sound that he loved best of all sounds was in his
dying ears--the flow of the Tweed over its pebbles.
Significant, therefore, is Scott's treatment of landscape, and the
difference in this regard between himself and his great contemporaries.
His friend, Mr. Morritt of Rokeby, testifies; "He was but half satisfied
with the most beautiful scenery when he could not connect it with some
local legend." Scott had to the full the romantic love of mountain and
lake, yet "to me," he confesses, "the wandering over the field of
Bannockburn was the source of more exquisite pleasure than gazing upon
the celebrated landscape from the battlements of Stirling Castle. I do
not by any means infer that I was dead to the feeling of picturesque
scenery. . . . But show me an old castle or a field of battle and I was
at home at once." And again: "The love of natural beauty, more
especially when combined with ancient ruins or remains of our fathers'
piety[16] or splendour, became with me an insatiable passion." It was
not in this sense that high mountains were a "passion" to Byron, nor yet
to Wordsworth. In a letter to Miss Seward, Scott wrote of popular
poetry: "Much of its peculiar charm is indeed, I believe, to be
attributed solely to its _locality_. . . . In some verses of that
eccentric but admirable poet Coleridge[17] he talks of
"'An old rude tale that suited well
The ruins wild and hoary.'
"I think there are few who have not been in some degree touched with this
local sympathy. Tell a peasant an ordinary tale of robbery and murder,
and perhaps you may fail to interest him; but, to excite his terrors, you
assure him it happened on the very heath he usually crosses, or to a man
whose family he has known, and you rarely meet such a mere image of
humanity as remains entirely unmoved. I suspect it is pretty much the
same with myself."
Scott liked to feel solid ground of history, or at least of legend, under
his feet. He connected his wildest tales, like "Glenfinlas" and "The Eve
of St. John," with definite names and places. This Antaeus of romance
lost strength, as soon as he was lifted above the earth. With Coleridge
it was just the contrary. The moment his moonlit, vapory enchantments
touched ground, the contact "precipitated the whole solution." In 1813
Scott had printed "The Bridal of Triermain" anonymously, with a preface
designed to mislead the public; having contrived, by way of a joke, to
fasten the authorship of the piece upon Erskine. This poem is as pure
fantasy as Tennyson's "Day Dream," and tells the story of a knight who,
in obedience to a vision and the instructions of an ancient sage "sprung
from Druid sires," enters an enchanted castle and frees the Princess
Gyneth, a natural daughter of King Arthur, from the spell that has bound
her for five hundred years. But true to his instinct, the poet lays his
scene not _in vacuo_, but near his own beloved borderland. He found, in
Burns' "Antiquities of Westmoreland and Cumberland" mention of a line of
Rolands de Vaux, lords of Triermain, a fief of the barony of Gilsland;
and this furnished him a name for his hero. He found in Hutchinson's
"Excursion to the Lakes" the description of a cluster of rocks in the
Vale of St. John's, which looked, at a distance, like a Gothic castle,
this supplied him with a hint for the whole adventure. Meanwhile
Coleridge had been living in the Lake Country. The wheels of his
"Christabel" had got hopelessly mired, and he now borrowed a horse from
Sir Walter and hitched it to his own wagon. He took over Sir Roland de
Vaux of Triermain and made him the putative father of his mysterious
Geraldine, although, in compliance with Scott's romance, the embassy that
goes over the mountains to Sir Roland's castle can find no trace of it.
In Part I. Sir Leoline's own castle stood nowhere in particular. In Part
II. it is transferred to Cumberland, a mistake in art almost as grave as
if the Ancient Mariner had brought his ship to port at Liverpool.
Wordsworth visited the "great Minstrel of the Border" at Abbotsford in
1831, shortly before Scott set out for Naples, and the two poets went in
company to the ruins of Newark Castle. It is characteristic that in
"Yarrow Revisited," which commemorates the incident, the Bard of Rydal
should think it necessary to offer an apology for his distinguished
host's habit of romanticising nature--that nature which Wordsworth,
romantic neither in temper nor choice of subject, treated after so
different a fashion.
"Nor deem that localised Romance
Plays false with our affections;
Unsanctifies our tears--made sport
For fanciful dejections:
Ah no! the visions of the past
Sustain the heart in feeling
Life as she is--our changeful Life,
With friends and kindred dealing."
The apology, after all, is only half-hearted. For while Wordsworth
esteemed Scott highly and was careful to speak publicly of his work with
a qualified respect, it is well known that, in private, he set little
value upon it, and once somewhat petulantly declared that all Scott's
poetry was not worth sixpence. He wrote to Scott, of "Marmion": "I think
your end has been attained. That it is not the end which I should wish
you to propose to yourself, you will be aware." He had visited Scott at
Lasswade as early as 1803, and in recording his impressions notes that
"his conversation was full of anecdote and averse from disquisition."
The minstrel was a _raconteur_ and lived in the past, the bard was a
moralist and lived in the present.
There are several poems of Wordsworth's and Scott's touching upon common
ground which serve to contrast their methods sharply and to illustrate in
a striking way the precise character of Scott's romanticism. "Helvellyn"
and "Fidelity" were written independently and celebrate the same
incident. In 1805 a young man lost his way on the Cumberland mountains
and perished of exposure. Three months afterwards his body was found,
his faithful dog still watching beside it. Scott was a lover of
dogs--loved them warmly, individually; so to speak, personally; and all
dogs instinctively loved Scott.[18]
Wordsworth had a sort of tepid, theoretical benevolence towards the
animal creation in general. Yet as between the two poets, the advantage
in depth of feeling is, as usual, with Wordsworth. Both render, with
perhaps equal power, though in characteristically different ways, the
impression of the austere and desolate grandeur of the mountain scenery.
But the thought to which Wordsworth leads up is the mysterious divineness
of instinct
". . . that strength of feeling, great
Above all human estimate:"--
while Scott conducts his story to the reflection that Nature has given
the dead man a more stately funeral than the Church could have given, a
comparison seemingly dragged in for the sake of a stanzaful of his
favourite Gothic imagery.
"When a Prince to the fate of the Peasant has yielded,
The tapestry waves dark round the dim-lighted hall;
With 'scutcheons of silver the coffin is shielded,
And pages stand mute by the canopied pall:
Through the courts at deep midnight the torches are gleaming,
In the proudly arched chapel the banners are beaming,
Far adown the long aisle sacred music is streaming,
Lamenting a chief of the people should fall."
Wordsworth and Landor, who seldom agreed, agreed that Scott's most
imaginative line was the verse in "Helvellyn":
"When the wind waved his garment how oft didst thou start!"
In several of his poems Wordsworth handled legendary subjects, and it is
most instructive here to notice his avoidance of the romantic note, and
to imagine how Scott would have managed the same material. In the
prefatory note to "The White Doe of Rylstone," Wordsworth himself pointed
out the difference. "The subject being taken from feudal times has led
to its being compared to some of Sir Walter Scott's poems that belong to
the same age and state of society. The comparison is inconsiderate. Sir
Walter pursued the customary and very natural course of conducting an
action, presenting various turns of fortune, to some outstanding point on
which the mind might rest as a termination or catastrophe. The course I
attempted to pursue is entirely different. Everything that is attempted
by the principal personages in 'The White Doe' fails, so far as its
object is external and substantial. So far as it is moral and spiritual
it succeeds."
This poem is founded upon "The Rising in the North," a ballad given in
the "Reliques," which recounts the insurrection of the Earls of
Northumberland and Westmoreland against Elizabeth in 1569. Richard
Norton of Rylstone, with seven stalwart sons, joined in the rising,
carrying a banner embroidered with a red cross and the five wounds of
Christ. The story bristled with opportunities for the display of feudal
pomp, and it is obvious upon what points in the action Scott would have
laid the emphasis; the muster of the tenantry of the great northern
Catholic houses of Percy and Neville; the high mass celebrated by the
insurgents in Durham Cathedral; the march of the Nortons to Brancepeth;
the eleven days' siege of Barden Tower; the capture and execution of
Marmaduke and Ambrose; and--by way of episode--the Battle of Neville's
Cross in 1346.[19] But in conformity to the principle announced in the
preface to the "Lyrical Ballads"--that the feeling should give importance
to the incidents and situation, not the incidents and situation to the
feeling--Wordsworth treats all this outward action as merely preparatory
to the true purpose of his poem, a study of the discipline of sorrow, of
ruin and bereavement patiently endured by the Lady Emily, the only
daughter and survivor of the Norton house.
"Action is transitory--a step, a blow. . . .
Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark,
And has the nature of infinity.
Yet through that darkness (infinite though it seem
And irremoveable) gracious openings lie. . . .
Even to the fountain-head of peace divine."
With the story of the Nortons the poet connects a local tradition which
he found in Whitaker's "History of the Deanery of Craven"; of a white doe
which haunted the churchyard of Bolton Priory. Between this gentle
creature and the forlorn Lady of Rylstone he establishes the mysterious
and soothing sympathy which he was always fond of imagining between the
soul of man and the things of nature.[20]
Or take again the "Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle," an incident in
the Wars of the Roses. Lord Clifford, who had been hidden away in
infancy from the vengeance of the Yorkists and reared as a shepherd, is
restored to the estates and honours of his ancestors. High in the festal
hall the impassioned minstrel strikes his harp and sings the triumph of
Lancaster, urging the shepherd lord to emulate the warlike prowess of his
forefathers.
"Armour rusting in his halls
On the blood of Clifford calls;
'Quell the Scot,' exclaims the Lance--
Bear me to the heart of France
Is the longing of the Shield."
Thus far the minstrel, and he has Sir Walter with him; for this is
evidently the part of the poem that he liked and remembered, when he
noted in his journal that "Wordsworth could be popular[21] if he
would--witness the 'Feast at Brougham Castle'--'Song of the Cliffords,' I
think, is the name." But the exultant strain ceases and the poet himself
speaks, and with the transition in feeling comes a change in the verse;
the minstrel's song was in the octosyllabic couplet associated with
metrical romance. But this Clifford was no fighter--none of Scott's
heroes. Nature had educated him.
"In him the savage virtue of the Race" was dead.
"Love had he found in huts where poor men lie;
His daily teachers had been woods and rills,
The silence that is in the starry sky,
The sleep that is among the lonely hills."
Once more, consider the pronounced difference in sentiment between the
description of the chase in "Hartleap Well" and the opening passage of
"The Lady of the Lake":
"The stag at eve had drunk his fill.
Where danced the moon on Monan's rill," etc.[22]
Scott was a keen sportsman, and his sympathy was with the hunter.[23]
Wordsworth's, of course, was with the quarry. The knight in his
poem--who bears not unsuggestively the name of "Sir Walter"--has
outstripped all his companions, like Fitz James, and is the only one in
at the death. To commemorate his triumph he frames a basin for the
spring whose waters were stirred by his victim's dying breath; he plants
three stone pillars to mark the creature's hoof-prints in its marvellous
leap from the mountain to the springside; and he builds a pleasure house
and an arbour where he comes with his paramour to make merry in the
summer days. But Nature sets her seal of condemnation upon the cruelty
and vainglory of man. "The spot is curst"; no flowers or grass will grow
there; no beast will drink of the fountain. Part I. tells the story
without enthusiasm but without comment. Part II. draws the lesson
"Never to blend our pleasure or our pride
With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels."
The song of Wordsworth's "Solitary Reaper" derives a pensive sorrow from
"old, unhappy, far-off things and battles long ago." But to Scott the
battle is not far off, but a vivid and present reality. When he visited
the Trosachs glen, his thought plainly was, "What a place for a fight!"
And when James looks down on Loch Katrine his first reflection is, "What
a scene were here . . .
"For princely pomp or churchman's pride!
On this bold brow a lordly tower;
In that soft vale a lady's bower;
On yonder meadow, far away,
The turrets of a cloister grey," etc.
The most romantic scene was not romantic enough for Scott till his
imagination had peopled it with the life of a vanished age.
The literary forms which Scott made peculiarly his own, and in which the
greater part of his creative work was done, are three: the popular
ballad, the metrical romance, and the historical novel in prose. His
point of departure was the ballad.[24] The material amassed in his
Liddesdale "raids"--begun in 1792 and continued for seven successive
years--was given to the world in the "Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border"
(Vols. I. and II. in 1802; Vol. III. in 1803), a collection of ballads
historical, legendary, and romantic, with an abundant apparatus in the
way of notes and introductions, illustrating the history, antiquities,
manners, traditions, and superstitions of the Borderers. Forty-three of
the ballads in the "Minstrelsy" had never been printed before; and of the
remainder the editor gave superior versions, choosing with sureness of
taste the best among variant readings, and with a more intimate knowledge
of local ways and language than any previous ballad-fancier had
commanded. He handled his texts more faithfully than Percy, rarely
substituting lines of his own. "From among a hundred corruptions," says
Lockhart, "he seized, with instinctive tact, the primitive diction and
imagery, and produced strains in which the unbroken energy of
half-civilised ages, their stern and deep passions, their daring
adventures and cruel tragedies, and even their rude wild humour are
reflected with almost the brightness of a Homeric mirror."
In the second volume of the "Minstrelsy" were included what Scott calls
his "first serious attempts in verse," viz., "Glenfinlas" and "The Eve of
St. John," which had been already printed in Lewis' "Tales of Wonder."
Both pieces are purely romantic, with a strong tincture of the
supernatural; but the first--Scott himself draws the distinction--is a
"legendary poem," and the second alone a proper "ballad."
"Glenfinlas," [25] founded on a Gaelic legend, tells how a Highland
chieftain while hunting in Perthshire, near the scene of "The Lady of the
Lake," is lured from his bothie at night and torn to pieces by evil
spirits. There is no attempt here to preserve the language of popular
poetry; stanzas abound in a diction of which the following is a fair
example:
"Long have I sought sweet Mary's heart,
And dropp'd the tear and heaved the sigh:
But vain the lover's wily art
Beneath a sister's watchful eye."
"The Eve of St. John" employs common ballad stuff, the visit of a
murdered lover's ghost to his lady's bedside--
"At the lone midnight hour, when bad spirits have power"--
but the poet, as usual, anchors his weird nightmares firmly to real names
and times and places, Dryburgh Abbey, the black rood of Melrose, the
Eildon-tree, the bold Buccleuch, and the Battle of Ancram Moor (1545).
The exact scene of the tragedy is Smailholme Tower, the ruined keep on
the crags above his grandfather's farm at Sandynowe, which left such an
indelible impression on Scott's childish imagination.[26] "The Eve" is
in ballad style and verse:
"Thou liest, thou liest, thou little foot page,
Loud dost thou lie to me!
For that knight is cold, and low laid in the mould,
All under the Eildon tree."
In his "Essay on the Imitation of Popular Poetry," Scott showed that he
understood the theory of ballad composition. When he took pains, he
could catch the very manner as well as the spirit of ancient minstrelsy;
but if his work is examined under the microscope it is easy to detect
flaws. The technique of the Pre-Raphaelites and other modern balladists,
like Rossetti and Morris, is frequently finer, they reproduce more
scrupulously the formal characteristics of popular poetry: the burden,
the sing-song repetitions, the quaint turns of phrase, the imperfect
rimes, the innocent, childlike air of the mediaeval tale-tellers.
Scott's vocabulary is not consistently archaic, and he was not always
careful to avoid locutions out of keeping with the style of
_Volkspoesie_.[27] He was by no means a rebel against eighteenth-century
usages.[28] In his prose he is capable of speaking of a lady as an
"elegant female." In his poetry he will begin a ballad thus:
"The Pope he was saying the high, high mass
All on St. Peter's day";
and then a little later fall into this kind of thing:
"There the rapt poet's step may rove,
And yield the muse the day:
There Beauty, led by timid Love,
May shun the tell-tale ray," etc.[29]
It is possible to name single pieces like "The Ancient Mariner," and "La
Belle Dame sans Merci," and "Rose-Mary," of a rarer imaginative quality
and a more perfect workmanship than Scott often attains; yet upon the
whole and in the mass, no modern balladry matches the success of his.
The Pre-Raphaelites were deliberate artists, consciously reproducing an
extinct literary form; but Scott had lived himself back into the social
conditions out of which ballad poetry was born. His best pieces of this
class do not strike us as imitations but as original, spontaneous, and
thoroughly alive. Such are, to particularise but a few, "Jock o'
Hazeldean," "Cadyow Castle," on the assassination of the Regent Murray;
"The Reiver's Wedding," a fragment preserved in Lockhart's "Life";
"Elspeth's Ballad" ("The Red Harlow") in "The Antiquary"; Madge
Wildfire's songs in "The Heart of Mid-Lothian," and David Gellatley's in
"Waverley"; besides the other scraps and snatches of minstrelsy too
numerous for mention, sown through the novels and longer poems. For in
spite of detraction, Walter Scott remains one of the foremost British
lyrists. In Mr. Palgrave's "Treasury" he is represented by a larger
number of selections than either Milton, Byron, Burns, Campbell, Keats,
or Herrick; making an easy fourth to Wordsworth, Shakspere, and Shelley.
And in marked contrast with Shelley especially, it is observable of
Scott's contributions to this anthology that they are not the utterance
of the poet's personal emotion; they are coronachs, pibrochs, gathering
songs, narrative ballads, and the like--objective, dramatic lyrics
touched always with the light of history or legend.
The step from ballad to ballad-epic is an easy one, and it was by a
natural evolution that the one passed into the other in Scott's hands.
"The Lay of the Last Minstrel" (1805) was begun as a ballad on the local
tradition of Gilpin Horner and at the request of the Countess of
Dalkeith, who told Scott the story. But his imagination was so full that
the poem soon overflowed its limits and expanded into a romance
illustrative of the ancient manners of the Border. The pranks of the
goblin page run in and out through the web of the tale, a slender and
somewhat inconsequential thread of _diablerie_. Byron had his laugh at
it in "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers";[30] and in a footnote on the
passage, he adds: "Never was any plan so incongruous and absurd as the
groundwork of this production." The criticism was not altogether
undeserved; for the "Lay" is a typical example of romantic, as
distinguished from classic, art both in its strength and in its weakness;
brilliant in passages, faulty in architechtonic, and uneven in execution.
Its supernatural machinery--Byron said that it had more "gramarye" than
grammar--is not impressive, if due exception be made of the opening of
Michael Scott's tomb in Canto Second.
When the "Minstrelsy" was published, it was remarked that it "contained
the elements of a hundred historical romances." It was from such
elements that Scott built up the structure of his poem about the nucleus
which the Countess of Dalkeith had given him. He was less concerned, as
he acknowledged, to tell a coherent story than to paint a picture of the
scenery and the old warlike life of the Border; that _tableau large de la
vie_ which the French romanticists afterwards professed to be the aim of
their novels and dramas. The feud of the Scotts and Carrs furnished him
with a historic background; with this he enwove a love story of the Romeo
and Juliet pattern. He rebuilt Melrose Abbey, and showed it by
moonlight; set Lords Dacre and Howard marching on a Warden-raid, and
roused the border clans to meet them; threw out dramatic character
sketches of "stark moss-riding Scots" like Wat Tinlinn and William of
Deloraine; and finally enclosed the whole in a _cadre_ most happily
invented, the venerable, pathetic figure of the old minstrel who tells
the tale to the Duchess of Monmouth at Newark Castle.
The love story is perhaps the weakest part of the poem. Henry Cranstoun
and Margaret of Branksome are nothing but lay figures. Scott is always a
little nervous when the lover and the lady are left alone together. The
fair dames in the audience expect a tender scene, but the harper pleads
his age, by way of apology, gets the business over as decently as may be,
and hastens on with comic precipitation to the fighting, which he
thoroughly enjoys.[31]
The "light-horseman stanza" which Scott employed in his longer poems was
caught from the recitation by Sir John Stoddart of a portion of
Coleridge's "Christabel," then still in manuscript. The norm of the
verse was the eight-syllabled riming couplet used in most of the English
metrical romances of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It is a
form of verse which moves more swiftly than blank verse or the heroic
couplet, and is perhaps better suited for romantic poetry.[32] But it is
liable to grow monotonous in a long poem, and Coleridge's unsurpassed
skill as a metrist was exerted to give it freedom, richness, and variety
by the introduction of anapaestic lines and alternate rimes and triplets,
breaking up the couplets into a series of irregular stanzas.
With "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" romanticism came of age and entered
on its career of triumph. One wishes that Collins and Tom Warton might
have lived to hail it as the light, at last, towards which they had
struggled through the cold obstruction of the eighteenth century. One
fancies Dr. Johnson's disgust over this new Scotch monstrosity, which had
every quality that he disliked except blank verse; or Gray's delight in
it, tempered by a critical disapproval of its loose construction and
irregularity. Scott's romances in prose and verse are still so
universally known as to make any review of them here individually an
impertinence. Their impact on contemporary Europe was instantaneous and
wide-spread. There is no record elsewhere in literary history of such
success. Their immense sales, the innumerable editions and translations
and imitations of them, are matters of familiar knowledge. Poem followed
poem, and novel, novel in swift and seemingly exhaustless succession, and
each was awaited by the public with unabated expectancy. Here once more
was a poet who could tell the world a story that it wanted to hear; a poet
"Such as it had
In the ages glad,
Long ago."
The Homeric[33] quality which criticism has attributed or denied to these
poems is really there. The difference, the inferiority is obvious of
course. They are not in the grand style; they are epic on a lower plane,
ballad-epic, bastard-epic perhaps, but they are epic. No English verse
narrative except Chaucer's ranks, as a whole, above Scott's. Chaucer's
disciple, William Morris, has an equal flow and continuity, and keeps a
more even level of style; but his story-telling is languid compared with
Scott's. The latter is greater in the dynamic than in the static
department--in scenes of rapid action and keen excitement. His show
passages are such as the fight in the Trosachs, Flodden Field, William of
Deloraine's ride to Melrose, the trial of Constance, the muster on the
Borough Moor, Marmion's defiance to Douglas, the combat of James and
Roderick Dhu, the summons of the fiery cross, and the kindling of the
need-fires--those romantic equivalents of the lampadephoroi in the
"Agamemnon."
In the series of long poems which followed the "Lay," Scott deserted the
Border and brought in new subjects of romantic interest, the traditions
of Flodden and Bannockburn, the manners of the Gaelic clansmen, and the
wild scenery of the Perthshire Highlands, the life of the Western
Islands, and the rugged coasts of Argyle. Only two of these tales are
concerned with the Middle Ages, strictly speaking: "The Lord of the
Isles" (1813), in which the action begins in 1307; and "Harold the
Dauntless" (1817), in which the period is the time of the Danish
settlements in Northumbria. "Rokeby" (1812) is concerned with the Civil
War. The scene is laid in Yorkshire, "Marmion" (1808), and "The Lady of
the Lake" (1810), like "The Lay of the Last Minstrel," had to do with the
sixteenth century, but the poet imported mediaeval elements into all of
these by the frankest anachronisms. He restored St. Hilda's Abbey and
the monastery at Lindisfarne, which had been in ruins for centuries, and
peopled them again with monks and nuns, He revived in De Wilton the
figure of the palmer and the ancient custom of pilgrimage to Palestine.
And he transferred "the wondrous wizard, Michael Scott" from the
thirteenth century to the end of the fifteenth. But, indeed, the state
of society in Scotland might be described as mediaeval as late as the
middle of the sixteenth century. It was still feudal, and in great part
Catholic. Particularly in the turbulent Borderland, a rude spirit of
chivalry and a passion for wild adventure lingered among the Eliots,
Armstrongs, Kerrs, Rutherfords, Homes, Johnstons, and other marauding
clans, who acknowledged no law but march law, and held slack allegiance
to "the King of Lothian and Fife." Every owner of a half-ruinous "peel"
or border keep had a band of retainers within call, like the
nine-and-twenty knights of fame who hung their shields in Branksome Hall;
and he could summon them at short notice, for a raid upon the English or
a foray against some neighbouring proprietor with whom he was at feud.
But the literary form under which Scott made the deepest impression upon
the consciousness of his own generation and influenced most permanently
the future literature of Europe, was prose fiction. As the creator of
the historical novel and the ancestor of Kingsley, Ainsworth, Bulwer, and
G. P. R. James; of Manzoni, Freytag, Hugo, Mérimée, Dumas, Alexis
Tolstoi, and a host of others, at home and abroad, his example is potent
yet. English fiction is directly or indirectly in his debt for "Romola,"
"Hypatia," "Henry Esmond," and "The Cloister and the Hearth." In several
countries the historical novel had been trying for centuries to get
itself born, but all its attempts had been abortive. "Waverley" is not
only vastly superior to "Thaddeus of Warsaw" (1803) and "The Scottish
Chiefs" (1809); it is something quite different in kind.[34] The
Waverley Novels, twenty-nine in number, appeared in the years 1814-31.
The earlier numbers of the series, "Waverley," "Guy Mannering," "The
Antiquary," "Old Mortality," "The Black Dwarf," "Rob Roy," "The Heart of
Mid-Lothian," "The Bride of Lammermoor," and "A Legend of Montrose," were
Scotch romances of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In
"Ivanhoe" (1819) the author went to England for his scene, and back to
the twelfth century for his period. Thenceforth he ranged over a wide
region in time and space; Elizabethan England ("Kenilworth"), the France
and Switzerland of Louis XI. and Charles the Bold ("Quentin Durward" and
"Anne of Geierstein"), Constantinople and Syria ("Count Robert of Paris,"
"The Betrothed," and "The Talisman") in the age of the Crusades. The
fortunes of the Stuarts, interested him specially and engaged him in
"Woodstock," "The Fortunes of Nigel," "The Monastery," and its sequel,
"The Abbot." He seems to have had, in the words of Mr. R. H. Hutton,
"something very like personal experience of a few centuries."
Scott's formula for the construction of a historical romance was original
with himself, and it has been followed by all his successors. His story
is fictitious, his hero imaginary. Richard I. is not the hero of
"Ivanhoe," nor Louis XI. of "Quentin Durward." Shakspere dramatised
history; Scott romanticised it. Still it is history, the private story
is swept into the stream of large public events, the fate of the lover or
the adventurer is involved with battles and diplomacies, with the rise
and fall of kings, dynasties, political parties, nations. Stevenson
says, comparing Fielding with Scott, that "in the work of the
latter . . . we become suddenly conscious of the background. . . . It
is curious enough to think that 'Tom Jones' is laid in the year '45, and
that the only use he makes of the rebellion is to throw a troop of
soldiers in his hero's way." [35] And it is this background which is,
after all, the important thing in Scott--the leading impression; the
broad canvas, the swarm of life, the spirit of the age, the
reconstitution of an extinct society. This he was able to give with
seeming ease and without any appearance of "cram." Chronicle matter does
not lie about in lumps on the surface of his romance, but is decently
buried away in the notes. In his comments on "Queenhoo Hall" he adverts
to the danger of a pedantic method, and in his "Journal" (October 18th,
1826) he writes as follows of his own numerous imitators: "They have to
read old books and consult antiquarian collections, to get their
knowledge. I write because I have long since read such works and
possess, thanks to a strong memory, the information which they have to
seek for. This leads to a dragging in historical details by head and
shoulders, so that the interest of the main piece is lost in minute
description of events which do not affect its progress."
Of late the recrudescence of the historical novel has revived the
discussion as to the value of the _genre_. It may be readily admitted
that Scott's best work is realistic, and is to be looked for in such
novels as "The Antiquary," "Old Mortality," "The Heart of Mid-Lothian,"
and in characters like Andrew Fairservice, Bailie Nicol Jarvie, Dandie
Dinmont, Dugald Dalgetty, Jeanie Deans, Edie Ochiltrie, which brought
into play his knowledge of men, his humour, observation of life, and
insight into Scotch human nature. Scott knew these people; he had to
divine James I., Louis XI., and Mary Stuart. The historical novel is a
_tour de force_. Exactly how knights-templars, burgomasters, friars,
Saracens, and Robin Hood archers talked and acted in the twelfth century,
we cannot know. But it is just because they are strange to our
experience that they are dear to our imagination. The justification of
romance is its unfamiliarity--"strangeness added to beauty"--"the
pleasure of surprise" as distinguished from "the pleasure of
recognition." Again and again realism returns to the charge and demands
of art that it give us the present and the actual; and again and again
the imagination eludes the demand and makes an ideal world for itself in
the blue distance.
Two favourite arts, or artifices, of all romantic schools, are "local
colour" and "the picturesque." "Vers l'an de grâce 1827," writes Prosper
Mérimée, "j'étais _romantique_. Nous disions aux _classiques_; vos Grecs
ne sont pas des Grecs, vos Romains ne sont pas des Romains; vous ne savez
pas donner à vos compositions la _couleur locale_. Point de salut sans
la _couleur locale_." [36]
As to the picturesque--a word that connotes, in its critical uses, some
quality in the objects of sense which strikes us as at once novel, and
characteristic in its novelty--while by no means the highest of literary
arts, it is a perfectly legitimate one.[37] Creçy is not, at bottom, a
more interesting battle than Gettysburg because it was fought with bows
and arrows, but it is more picturesque to the modern imagination just for
that reason. Why else do the idiots in "MacArthur's Hymn" complain that
"steam spoils romance at sea"? Why did Ruskin lament when the little
square at the foot of Giotto's Tower in Florence was made a stand for
hackney coaches? Why did our countryman Halleck at Alnwick Towers resent
the fact that "the Percy deals in salt and hides, the Douglas sells red
herring"? And why does the picturesque tourist, in general, object to
the substitution of naphtha launches for gondolas on the Venetian canals?
Perhaps because the more machinery is interposed between man and the
thing he works on, the more impersonal becomes his relation to nature.
Carlyle, in his somewhat grudging estimate of Scott, declares that "much
of the interest of these novels results from contrasts of costume. The
phraseology, fashion of arms, of dress, of life belonging to one age is
brought suddenly with singular vividness before the eyes of another. A
great effect this; yet by the very nature of it an altogether temporary
one. Consider, brethren, shall not we too one day be antiques and grow
to have as quaint a costume as the rest? . . . Not by slashed breeches,
steeple hats, buff belts, or antiquated speech can romance-heroes
continue to interest us; but simply and solely, in the long run, by being
_men_. Buff belts and all manner of jerkins and costumes are transitory;
man alone is perennial." [38] Carlyle's dissatisfaction with Scott
arises from the fact that he was not a missionary nor a transcendental
philosopher, but simply a teller of stories. Heine was not troubled in
the same way, but he made the identical criticism, "Like the works of
Walter Scott, so also do Fouqué's romances of chivalry[40] remind us of
the fantastic tapestries known as Gobelins, whose rich texture and
brilliant colors are more pleasing to our eyes than edifying to our
souls. We behold knightly pageantry, shepherds engaged in festive
sports, hand-to-hand combats, and ancient customs, charmingly
intermingled. It is all very pretty and picturesque, but shallow;
brilliant superficiality. Among the imitators of Fouqué, as among the
imitators of Walter Scott, this mannerism of portraying--not the inner
nature of men and things, but merely the outward garb and appearance--was
carried to still greater extremes. This shallow art and frivolous style
is still [1833] in vogue in Germany as well as in England and
France. . . . In lieu of a knowledge of mankind, our recent novelists
evince a profound acquaintance with clothes." [39]
Elsewhere Heine acknowledges a deeper reason for the popularity of the
Scotch novels. "Their theme . . . is the mighty sorrow for the loss of
national peculiarities swallowed up in the universality of the newer
culture--a sorrow which is now throbbing in the hearts of all peoples.
For national memories lie deeper in the human breast than is generally
thought." But whatever rank may be ultimately assigned to the historical
novel as an art form, Continental critics are at one with the British in
crediting its invention to Scott. "It is an error," says Heine, "not to
recognise Walter Scott as the founder of the so-called historical
romance, and to endeavour to trace it to German imitation." He adds that
Scott was a Protestant, a lawyer and a Scotchman, accustomed to action
and debate, in whose works the aristocratic and democratic elements are
in wholesome balance; "whereas our German romanticists eliminated the
democratic element entirely from their novels, and returned to the ruts
of those crazy romances of knight-errantry that flourished before
Cervantes." [41] "Quel est Fouvrage littéraire," asks Stendhal in
1823,[42] "qui a le plus réussi en France depuis dix ans? Les romans de
Walter Scott. . . . On s'est moqué à Paris pendant vingt ans du roman
historique; l'Académie a prouvé doctement le ridicule de ce genre; nous y
croyions tous, lorsque Walter Scott a paru, son Waverley à la main; et
Balantyne, son libraire vient de mourir millionaire." [43]
Lastly the service of the Waverley Novels to history was an important
one. Palgrave says that historical fiction is the mortal enemy of
history, and Leslie Stephen adds that it is also the enemy of fiction.
In a sense both sayings are true. Scott was not always accurate as to
facts and sinned freely against chronology. But he rescued a wide realm
from cold oblivion and gave it back to human consciousness and sympathy.
It is treating the past more kindly to misrepresent it in some
particulars, than to leave it a blank to the imagination. The
eighteenth-century historians were incurious of life. Their spirit was
general and abstract; they were in search of philosophical formulas.
Gibbon covers his subject with a lava-flood of stately rhetoric which
stiffens into a uniform stony coating over the soft surface of life.
Scott is primarily responsible for that dramatic, picturesque treatment
of history which we find in Michelet and Carlyle. "These historical
novels," testifies Carlyle, "have taught all men this truth, which looks
like a truism, and yet was as good as unknown to writers of history and
others, till so taught; that the bygone ages of the world were actually
filled by living men, not by protocols, state papers, controversies, and
abstractions of men. . . . It is a great service, fertile in
consequences, this that Scott has done; a great truth laid open by
him." [44] In France, too, historians like Barante and Augustin Thierry,
were Scott's professed disciples. The latter confesses, in a well-known
passage, that "Ivanhoe" was the inspirer of his "Conquête d'Angleterre,"
and styles the novelist "le plus grand maître qu'il y ait jamais eu en
fait de divination historique." [45]
Scott apprehended the Middle Ages on their spectacular, and more
particularly, their military side. He exhibits their large, showy
aspects: battles, processions, hunts, feasts in hall, tourneys,[46]
sieges, and the like. The motley mediaeval world swarms in his pages,
from the king on his throne down to the jester with his cap and bells.
But it was the outside of it that he saw; the noise, bustle, colour,
stirring action that delighted him. Into its spiritualities he did not
penetrate far; its scholasticisms, strange casuistries, shuddering
faiths, grotesque distortions of soul, its religious mysticisms,
asceticisms, agonies; the ecstactic reveries of the cloister, terrors of
hell, and visions of paradise. It was the literature of the knight, not
of the monk, that appealed to him. He felt the awfulness and the beauty
of Gothic sacred architecture and of Catholic ritual. The externalities
of the mediaeval church impressed him, whatever was picturesque in its
ceremonies or august in its power. He pictured effectively such scenes
as the pilgrimage to Melrose in the "Lay"; the immuring of the renegade
nun in "Marmion"; the trial of Rebecca for sorcery by the Grand Master of
the Temple in "Ivanhoe." Ecclesiastical figures abound in his pages,
jolly friars, holy hermits, lordly prelates, grim inquisitors, abbots,
priors, and priests of all descriptions, but all somewhat conventional
and viewed _ab extra_. He could not draw a saint.[47] Significant,
therefore, is his indifference to Dante, the poet _par excellence_ of the
Catholic Middle Age, the epitomizer of mediaeval thought. "The plan" of
the "Divine Comedy," "appeared to him unhappy; the personal malignity and
strange mode of revenge presumptuous and uninteresting." Scott's genius
was antipathetic to Dante's; and he was as incapable of taking a lasting
imprint from his intense, austere, and mystical spirit, as from the
nebulous gloom of the Ossianic poetry. Though conservative, he was not
reactionary after the fashion of the German "throne-and-altar"
romanticists, but remained always a good Church of England man and an
obstinate opponent of Catholic emancipation.[48] "Creeds are data in his
novels," says Bagehot; "people have different creeds but each keeps his
own."
Scott's interest in popular superstitions was constant. As a young
man--in his German ballad period--they affected his imagination with a
"pleasing horror." But as he grew older, they engaged him less as a poet
than as a student of _Cultur geschichte_.
A wistful sense of the beauty of these old beliefs--a rational smile at
their absurdity--such is the tone of his "Letters on Demonology and
Witchcraft" (1830), a passage or two from which will give his attitude
very precisely; an attitude, it will be seen, which is after all not so
very different from Addison's, allowing for the distance in time and
place, and for Scott's livelier imagination.[49] Scott had his laugh at
Mrs. Radcliffe, and in his reviews of Hoffmann's "Tales" and Maturin's
"Fatal Revenge" [50] he insists upon the delicacy with which the
supernatural must be treated in an age of disbelief. His own management
of such themes, however, though much superior to Walpole's or Mrs.
Radcliffe's, has not the subtle art of Coleridge. The White Lady of
Avenel, _e.g._, in "The Abbot," is a notorious failure. There was too
much daylight in his imagination for spectres to be quite at home. "The
shapes that haunt thought's wildernesses"; the "night side of things";
the real shudder are not there, as in Hawthorne or in Poe. Walter
Pater[51] says that Meinhold's "Amber Witch" has more of the true
romantic spirit than Tieck, who was its professional representative. On
the contrary, it has less of the romantic spirit, but more of the
mediaeval fact. It is a literal, realistic handling of the witch
superstition, as Balzac's "Succube," in the "Contes Drolatiques" is a
satirical version of similar material. But Tieck's "Märchen" are the
shadows thrown by mediaeval beliefs across a sensitive, modern
imagination, and are in result, therefore, romantic. Scott's dealing
with subjects of the kind is midway between Meinhold and Tieck. He does
not blink the ugly, childish, stupid, and cruel features of popular
superstition, but throws the romantic glamour over them, precisely as he
does over his "Charlie over the water" Jacobites.[52]
Again Scott's apprehension of the spirit of chivalry, though less
imperfect than his apprehension of the spirit of mediaeval Catholicism,
was but partial. Of the themes which Ariosto sang--
"Le donne, i cavalier, l'arme, gli amori,
Le cortesie, l'audaci imprese io canto"--
the northern Ariosto sang bravely the _arme_ and the _audaci imprese_;
less confidently the _amori_ and the _cortesie_. He could sympathise
with the knight-errant's high sense of honour and his love of bold
emprise; not so well with his service of dames. Mediaeval courtship or
"love-drurye," the trembling self-abasement of the lover before his lady,
the fantastic refinements and excesses of gallantry, were alien to
Scott's manly and eminently practical turn of mind. It is hardly
possible to fancy him reading the "Roman de la Rose" with patience--he
thought "Troilus and Creseyde" tedious, which Rossetti pronounces the
finest of English love poems; or selecting for treatment the story of
Heloise or Tristram and Iseult, or of "Le Chevalier de la Charette"; or
such a typical mediaeval life as that of Ulrich von Liechtenstein.[53]
These were quite as truly beyond his sphere as a church legend like the
life of Saint Margaret or the quest of the Sangreal. In the "Talisman"
he praises in terms only less eloquent than Burke's famous words, "that
wild spirit of chivalry which, amid its most extravagant and fantastic
nights, was still pure from all selfish alloy--generous, devoted, and
perhaps only thus far censurable, that it proposed objects and courses of
action inconsistent with the frailties and imperfections of man." In
"Ivanhoe," too, there is something like a dithyrambic lament over the
decay of knighthood--"The 'scutcheons have long mouldered from the
walls," etc.; but even here, enthusiasm is tempered by good sense, and
Richard of the Lion Heart is described as an example of the "brilliant
but useless character of a knight of romance." All this is but to say
that the picture of the Middle Age which Scott painted was not complete.
Still it was more nearly complete than has yet been given by any other
hand; and the artist remains, in Stevenson's phrase, "the king of the
Romantics."
APPENDIX A.
"Jamais homme de génie n'a eu l'honneur et le bonheur d'être imité par
plus d'hommes de genié, si tous les grands écrivains de l'époque
romantique depuis Victor Hugo jusqu'à Balzac et depuis Alfred de Vigny
jusqu'à Mérimée, lui doivent tous et se sont tous glorifiés de lui devoir
quelque chose. . . . Il doit nous suffire pour l'instant d'affirmer que
l'influence de Walter Scott est à la racine même des grandes oeuvres qui
ont donné au nouveau genre tant d'éclat dans notre littérature; que c'est
elle qui les a inspirées, suscitées, fait éclore; que sans lui nous
n'aurions ni 'Hans d'Islande,' ni 'Cinq-Mars,' ni 'Les Chouans,' ni la
'Chronique de Charles IX.,' ni 'Notre Dame de Paris,' . . . Ce n'est
rien moins que le romantisme lui-même dont elle a hâté l'incubation,
facilité l'eclosion, aidé le développement."--MAIGRON, "Le Roman
Historique," p. 143.
"Il nous faut d'abord constater que c'est véritablement de Walter Scott,
et de Walter Scott seul, que commence cette fureur des choses du moyen
âge, cette manie de couleur locale qui sévit avec tant d'intensité
quelque temps avant et longtemps après 1830, et donc qu'il reste, au
moins pour ce qui est de la description, le principal initiateur de la
génération nouvelle. Sans doute et de toute part, cette résurrection du
moyen âge était des long-temps préparée. Le 'Génie du Christianisme,' le
'Cours de litterature dramatique' de Schlegel, l''Allemagne' de Mme. de
Staël avaient fait des moeurs chrétiennes et chevaleresques le fondement
et la condition de renouvellement de l'art français. Et, en effet, dès
1802, le moyen âge était découvert, la cathédrale gothique restaurée,
l'art chretien remis à la place éminente d'où il aurait fallu ne jamais
le laisser choir. Mais où sont les oeuvres exécutées d'après ce modèle
et ces principes? S'il est facile d'apercevoir et de déterminer la
cathédrale religieuse de Chateaubriand, est il donc si aisé de distinguer
sa cathédrale poétique? . . . Un courant vigoureux, que le 'Genie du
Christianisme' et les 'Martyrs' ont puissamment contribué à detérminer,
fait dériver les imaginations vers les choses gothiques; volontiers,
l'esprit français se retourne alors vers le passé comme vers la seule
source de poésie; et voici qu'un étranger vient se faire son guide et
fait miroiter, devant tous les yeux éblouis, la fantasmagorie du moyen
âge, donjons et créneaux, cuirasses et belles armures, haquenées et
palefrois, chevaliers resplendissants et mignonnes et délicates
chatelaines. . . . Sur ses traces, on se précipita avec furie dans la
voie qu'il venait subitement d'élargir. Ce moyen age, jusqu'à lui si
convoité et si infécond, devinait enfin une source inépuisable d'émotions
et de productions artistiques. La 'cathédrale' était bien restaurée
cette fois. Elle le fut même trop, et borda trop obstinement tous les
sentiers littéraires. Mais de cet excès, si vite fatigant, c'est Walter
Scott et non Chateaubriand, quoi qu'il en ait pu dire, qui reste le grand
coupable. Il fit plus que découvrir le moyen âge; il le mit à la mode
parmi les Français."--_Ibid_., pp. 195 _ff_.
APPENDIX B.
"The magical touch and the sense of mystery and all the things that are
associated with the name romance, when that name is applied to 'The
Ancient Mariner,' or 'La Belle Dame sans Merci,' or 'The Lady of
Shalott,' are generally absent from the most successful romances of the
great mediaeval romantic age. . . . The true romantic interest is very
unequally distributed over the works of the Middle Ages, and there is
least of it in the authors who are most representative of the 'age of
chivalry.' There is a disappointment prepared for any one who looks in
the greater romantic authors of the twelfth century for the music of 'The
Faery Queene' or 'La Belle Dame sans Merci.' . . . The greater authors
of the twelfth century have more affinity to the 'heroic romance' of the
school of the 'Grand Cyrus' than to the dreams of Spenser or
Coleridge. . . . The magic that is wanting to the clear and elegant
narrative of Benoit and Chrestien will be found elsewhere; it will be
found in one form in the mystical prose of the 'Queste del St. Graal'--a
very different thing from Chrestien's 'Perceval'--it will be found, again
and again, in the prose of Sir Thomas Malory; it will be found in many
ballads and ballad burdens, in 'William and Margaret,' in 'Binnorie,' in
the 'Wife of Usher's Well,' in the 'Rime of the Count Arnaldos,' in the
'Königskinder'; it will be found in the most beautiful story of the
Middle Ages, 'Aucassin and Nicolette,' one of the few perfectly beautiful
stories in the world."--"Epic and Romance," W. P. Ker, London, 1897, p.
371 _ff_.
[1] Scott's translations from the German are considered in the author's
earlier volume, "A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth
Century." Incidental mention of Scott occurs throughout the same volume;
and a few of the things there said are repeated, in substance though not
in form, in the present chapter. It seemed better to risk some
repetition than to sacrifice fulness of treatment here.
[2] "The Development of the English Novel," by Wilbur L. Cross, p. 131.
[3] Vol. i., p. 300.
[4] The sixth canto of the "Lay" closes with a few lines translated from
the "Dies Irae" and chanted by the monks in Melrose Abbey.
[5] Vol. i., pp. 389-404.
[6] Vol. i., pp. 48-49.
[7] "Scott was entirely incapable of entering into the spirit of any
classical scene. He was strictly a Goth and a Scot, and his sphere of
sensation may be almost exactly limited by the growth of
heather."--Ruskin, "Modern Painters," vol. iii., p. 317.
[8] "Marmion": Introduction to Canto third. In the preface to "The
Bridal of Triermain," the poet says: "According to the author's idea of
Romantic Poetry, as distinguished from Epic, the former comprehends a
fictitious narrative, framed and combined at the pleasure of the writer;
beginning and ending as he may judge best; which neither exacts nor
refuses the use of supernatural machinery; which is free from the
technical rules of the _Epée_. . . . In a word, the author is absolute
master of his country and its inhabitants."
[9] Scott's ascription of "Sir Tristram" to Thomas the Rhymer, or Thomas
of Erceldoune, was doubtless a mistake. His edition of the romance was
printed in 1804. In 1800 he had begun a prose tale, "Thomas the Rhymer,"
a fragment of which is given in the preface to the General Edition of the
Waverley Novels (1829). This old legendary poet and prophet, who
flourished _circa_ 1280, and was believed to have been carried off by the
Queen of Faerie into Eildon Hill, fascinated Scott's imagination
strongly. See his version of the "True Thomas'" story in the
"Minstrelsy," as also the editions of this very beautiful romance in
Child's "Ballads," in the publications of the E. E. Text So.; and by
Alois Brandl, Berlin: 1880.
[10] See vol. i., p. 390.
[11] See the General Preface to the Waverley Novels for some remarks on
"Queenhoo Hall" which Strutt began and Scott completed.
[12] _Cf._ vol. i., p. 344.
[13] "I am therefore descended from that ancient chieftain whose name I
have made to ring in many a ditty, and from his fair dame, the Flower of
Yarrow--no bad genealogy for a Border minstrel."
[14] "He neither cared for painting nor sculpture, and was totally
incapable of forming a judgment about them. He had some confused love of
Gothic architecture because it was dark, picturesque, old and like
nature; but could not tell the worst from the best, and built for himself
probably the most incongruous and ugly pile that gentlemanly modernism
ever devised."--Ruskin. "Modern Painters," vol. iii., p. 271.
[15] See vol. i., p. 200.
[16] The _Abbey_ of Tintern was irrelevant to Wordsworth.--Herford. "The
Age of Wordsworth," Int., p. xx.
[17] "Dear Sir Walter Scott and myself were exact, but harmonious,
opposites in this:--that every old ruin, hill, river or tree called up in
his mind a host of historical or biographical associations; . . .
whereas, for myself . . . I believe I should walk over the plain of
Marathon without taking more interest in it than in any other plain of
similar features."--Coleridge, "Table Talk," August 4, 1833.
[18] See the delightful anecdote preserved by Carlyle about the little
Blenheim cocker who hated the "genus acrid-quack" and formed an immediate
attachment to Sir Walter. Wordsworth was far from being an acrid quack,
or even a solemn prig--another genus hated of dogs--but there was
something a little unsympathetic in his personality. The dalesmen liked
poor Hartley Coleridge better.
[19] Scott could scarcely have forborne to introduce the figure of the
Queen of Scots, to insure whose marriage with Norfolk was one of the
objects of the rising.
[20] For a full review of "The White Doe" the reader should consult
Principal Shairp's "Aspects of Poetry," 1881.
[21] Scott averred that Wordsworth offended public taste on system.
[22] This is incomparable, not only as a masterpiece of romantic
narrative, but for the spirited and natural device by which the hero is
conducted to his adventure. R. L. Stevenson and other critics have been
rather hard upon Scott's defects as an artist. He was indeed no stylist:
least of all a _precieux_. There are no close-set mosaics in his
somewhat slip-shod prose, and he did not seek for the right word "with
moroseness," like Landor. But, in his large fashion, he was skilful in
inventing impressive effects. Another instance is the solitary trumpet
that breathed its "note of defiance" in the lists of Ashby-de-la-Zouch,
which has the genuine melodramatic thrill--like the horn of Hernani or
the bell that tolls in "Venice Preserved."
[23] See the "Hunting Song" in his continuation of "Queenhoo Hall"--
"Waken, lords and ladies gay,
On the mountain dawns the day."
[24] See vol. i., pp. 277 and 390.
[25] The Glen of the Green Women.
[26] "And still I thought that shattered tower
The mightiest work of human power;
And marvelled as the aged hind
With some strange tale bewitched my mind,
Of foragers who, with headlong force,
Down from that strength had spurred their horse,
Their Southern rapine to renew,
Far in the distant Cheviots blue;
And, home returning, filled the hall
With revel, wassail-rout and brawl."--"Marmion." Introduction
to Canto Third. See Lockhart for a description of the view from
Smailholme, _à propos_ of the stanza in "The Eve of St. John":
"That lady sat in mournful mood;
Looked over hill and vale:
O'ver Tweed's fair flood, and Mertoun's wood,
And all down Teviot dale."
[27] See vol. i., pp. 394-395.
[28] Scott's verse "is touched both with the facile redundance of the
mediaeval romances in which he was steeped, and with the meretricious
phraseology of the later eighteenth century, which he was too genuine a
literary Tory wholly to put aside."--"The Age of Wordsworth," C. H.
Herford, London. 1897.
[29] "The Gray Brother" in vol. iii. of the "Minstrelsy."
[30] "And goblin brats, of Gilpin Horner's brood,
Decoy young border-nobles through the wood,
And skip at every step, Lord knows how high,
And frighten foolish babes, the Lord knows why."
[31] "Now leave we Margaret and her knight
To tell you of the approaching fight."--Canto Fifth, xiii.
[32] Landor says oddly of Warton that he "had lost his ear by laying it
down on low swampy places, on ballads and sonnets."
[33] Does not the quarrel of Richard and Philip in "The Talisman" remind
one irresistibly of Achilles and Agamemnon in the "Iliad"?
[34] For a review of English historical fiction before Scott, consult
Professor Cross' "Development of the English Novel," pp. 110-114.
[35] "Familiar Studies of Men and Books," by R. L. Stevenson. Article,
"Victor Hugo's Romances."
[36] "Le Roman Historique à l'Epoque Romantique." Essai sur l'influence
de Walter Scott. Par Louis Maigron. Paris (Hachette). 1898, p. 331,
_note_. And _ibid_., p. 330: "Au lieu que les classiques s'efforçaient
toujours, à travers les modifications que les pays, les temps et les
circonstances peuvent apporter aux sentiments et aux passions des hommes,
d'atteindre à ce que ces passions et ces sentiments conservent de
permanent, d'immuable et d'éternel, c'est au contraire à l'expression de
l'accidentel et du relatif que les novateurs devaient les efforts de leur
art. Plus simplement, à la place de la vérité humaine, ils devaient
mettre la vérité locale." Professor Herford says that what Scott "has in
common with the Romantic temper is simply the feeling for the
picturesque, for colour, for contrast." "Age of Wordsworth," p. 121.
[37] De Quincey defines _picturesque_ as "the characteristic pushed into
a sensible excess." The word began to excite discussion in the last
quarter of the eighteenth century. See vol. i., p. 185, for Gilpin's
"Observations on Picturesque Beauty." See also Uvedale Price, "Essays on
the Picturesque as Compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful," three
vols., 1794-96. Price finds the character of the picturesque to consist
in roughness, irregularity, intricacy, and sudden variation. Gothic
buildings are more picturesque than Grecian, and a ruin than an entire
building. Hovels, cottages, mills, interiors of old barns are
picturesque. "In mills particularly, such is the extreme intricacy of
the wheels and the wood work: such is the singular variety of forms and
of lights and shadows, of mosses and weather stains from the constant
moisture, of plants springing from the rough joints of the stones--that,
even without the addition of water, an old mill has the greatest charm
for a painter" (i., 55). He mentions, as a striking example of
picturesque beauty, a hollow lane or by-road with broken banks, thickets,
old neglected pollards, fantastic roots bared by the winter torrents,
tangled trailers and wild plants, and infinite variety of tints and
shades (i., 23-29). He denounces the improvements of Capability Brown
(see "Romanticism," vol. i., p. 124): especially the clump, the belt and
regular serpentine walks with smooth turf edges, the made water with
uniformly sloping banks--all as insipidly formal, in their way, as the
old Italian gardens which Brown's landscapes displaced.
[38] "Essay on Walter Scott."
[39] Andrew Lang reminds us that, after all, only three of the Waverley
Novels are "chivalry romances." The following are the only numbers of
the series that have to do with the Middle Ages: "Count Robert of Paris,"
_circa_ 1090 A.D.; "The Betrothed," 1187; "The Talisman," 1193;
"Ivanhoe," 1194; "The Fair Maid of Perth," 1402; "Quentin Durward," 1470;
"Anne of Geierstein," 1474-77.
[40] "The Romantic School in Germany," p. 187. _Cf._ Stendhal, "Walter
Scott et la Princesse de Clèves." "Mes reflexions seront mal accueilles.
Une immense troupe de littérateurs est intéressée à porter aux nues Sir
Walter Scott et sa maniere. L'habit et le collier de cuivre d'un serf du
moyen âge sont plus facile à décrire que les mouvements du coeur
humain. . . . N'oublions pas un autre avantage de l'école de Sir Walter
Scott: la description d'un costume et la _pose_ d'un personnage . . .
prennent au moins deux pages. Les mouvements de l'âme fourniraient à
peine quelques lignes. Ouvrez au hazard un cies volumes de la 'Princesse
de Clèves,' prenez dix pages au hasard, et ensuite comparez les aux dix
pages d'Ivanhoe' ou de 'Quentin Durward': ces derniers ouvrages ont un
_mérite historique_. Ils apprennent quelques petites choses sur
l'histoire aux gens qui l'ignorent ou qui le savent mal. Ce mérite
historique a causé un grand plaisir: je ne le nie pas, mais c'est ce
mérite historique qui se fanera le premier. . . . Dans 146 ans, Sir
Walter Scott ne sera pas à la hauteur où Corneille nous apparait 146 ans
après sa mort." "To write a modern romance of chivalry." says Jeffrey,
in his review of "Marmion" in the _Edinburgh_, "seems to be much such a
phantasy as to build a modern abbey or an English pagoda. . . .
[Scott's] genius, seconded by the omnipotence of fashion, has brought
chivalry again into temporary favor. Fine ladies and gentlemen now talk,
indeed, of donjons, keeps, tabards, 'scutcheons, tressures, caps of
maintenance, portcullises, wimples, and we know not what besides; just as
they did, in the days of Dr. Darwin's popularity, of gnomes, sylphs,
oxygen, gossamer, polygynia, and polyandria. That fashion, however,
passed rapidly away, and Mr. Scott should take care that a different sort
of pedantry," etc.
[41] For an exhaustive review of Scott's influence on the evolution of
historical fiction in France, consult Maigron, "Le Roman Historique,"
etc. A longish passage from this work will be found at the end of the
present chapter. For English imitators and successors of the Waverley
Novels, see Cross, "Development of the English Novel," pp. 136-48. See
also De Quincey's "Literary Reminiscences," vol. iii., for an amusing
account of "Walladmor" (1824), a pretended German translation of a
non-existent Waverley novel.
[42] "Racine et Shakespeare."
[43] "Don Quixote."
[44] "Sir Walter Scott."
[45] "Dix ans d'études historiques": preface.
[46] Walter Bagehot says that "Ivanhoe" "describes the Middle Ages as we
should have wished them to be," ignoring their discomforts and harsh
barbarism. "Every boy has heard of tournaments and has a firm persuasion
that in an age of tournaments life was thoroughly well understood. A
martial society where men fought hand to hand on good horses with large
lances," etc. ("The Waverley Novels").
[47] "Of enthusiasm in religion Scott always spoke very severely. . . .
I do not think there is a single study in all his romances of what may be
fairly called a pre-eminently spiritual character" (R. H. Hutton: "Sir
Walter Scott," p. 126).
[48] "Unopposed, the Catholic superstition may sink to dust, with all its
absurd ritual and solemnities. Still it is an awful risk. The world is
in fact as silly as ever, and a good competence of nonsense will always
find believers." ("Diary" for 1829).
[49] See vol. i., p. 42. "We almost envy the credulity of those who in
the gentle moonlight of a summer night in England, amid the tangled
glades of a deep forest, or the turfy swell of her romantic commons,
could fancy they saw the fairies tracing their sportive ring. But it is
in vain to regret illusions which, however engaging, must of necessity
yield their place before the increase of knowledge, like shadows at the
advance of morn." ("Demonology." p. 183). "Tales of ghosts and
demonology are out of date at forty years of age and upward. . . . If I
were to write on the subject at all, it should have been during a period
of life when I could have treated it with more interesting
vivacity. . . . Even the present fashion of the world seems to be
ill-suited for studies of this fantastic nature: and the most ordinary
mechanic has learning sufficient to laugh at the figments which in former
times were believed by persons far advanced in the deepest knowledge of
the age." (_Ibid_., p. 398).
[50] See vol. i., pp. 249 and 420.
[51] "Postscript" to "Appreciations."
[52] For the rarity of the real romantic note in mediaeval writers see
vol. i., pp. 26-28, and Appendix B to the present chapter.
[53] See "Studies in Mediaeval Life and Literature," by Edward T.
McLaughlin, p. 34.