THE _WAVERLEY_ NOVELS
It must probably have been in 1813 that Scott, hunting for some fishing
tackle in an old bureau, found both the flies (they were red palmers
tied on several strands of grey horse hairs), and also the manuscript of
the first chapters of _Waverley_, begun in 1805 and reconsidered in
1810. The novel was advertised in _The Scots Magazine_ of February, as
to appear in March. But, very characteristically, Scott now dropped the
novel, and gave the spring months to composing the essays on “Chivalry”
and “Romance” for Constable’s new purchase, _The Encyclopaedia
Britannica_. Then, in June 1814, Lockhart, at a dinner party of young
men in George Street, saw through a window of North Castle Street the
writing hand “that never stops--page after page is finished and thrown
on that heap of MSS.; and still it goes on unwearied, and so it will be
till candles are brought in, and God knows how long after that.... I
well know what hand that is--’tis Walter Scott’s,” said Lockhart’s
host.
Thus, in three summer weeks, Scott wrote the two last volumes of
_Waverley_, the anonymous romance that began a literary revolution.
Novels, of course, were written always, since the days of Richardson and
Fielding and Miss Burney. But Miss Burney had long been silent: Mrs.
Radcliffe had ceased to terrify and amaze, and Miss Edgeworth, in
Lockhart’s opinion, “had never realized a tithe of £700 by the best of
her Irish tales,” which Scott regarded as one source of his inspiration.
Novels were in 1814 abandoned, said Morritt, to the Lydia Languishes and
their maids; they were disdained by the then relatively serious members
of the reading public who “formed libraries.” _Waverley_ came with its
successors and with the swarm of imitations, and libraries were formed
no more. The public, indeed, still bought the poetry of Byron with
enthusiasm, but Shelley and Keats they rejected. I doubt if there was a
first edition of _Christabel_, and the reign of novels and nothing but
novels began. There were interruptions to this despotism when Tennyson
was in his golden prime, and when Macaulay and Froude wrote history, but
to-day the Novel is supreme, and--the novels are not _Waverley_ novels.
[Sidenote: YACHTING TOUR]
It was Scott, the greatest of readers, who inaugurated the reign of
novel-reading, and very much chagrined he would be could he see the
actual results: the absolute horror with which mankind shun every other
study. It could never have occurred to Scott, that, within less than a
hundred years, male and female novelists, often as ignorant of books as
of life, would monopolize the general attention, and would give
themselves out as authorities on politics, philosophy, ethics, society,
theology, religion, and Homeric criticism. Scott’s own tales never
usurped the office of the pulpit, the platform, or the Press; and, if he
did teach some readers all the history that they knew, he constantly
warned them that, in his romances, he was an historian with a very large
poetical licence.
No sooner had Scott read the proof-sheets of _Waverley_ than he sailed
from Leith (July 28, 1814) with a festal crew of friends, including
Erskine, on board the Lighthouse yacht. The Surveyor, Viceroy of the
jolly Commissioners of Lighthouses, was the ancestor of Mr. Robert Louis
Stevenson, “a most gentlemanlike and modest man and well-known for his
scientific skill,” writes Scott in his _Diary_. That he kept a very
copious diary on a pleasure voyage is an example of his indomitable
habit of writing, unfatigued by the production of two volumes of a novel
in three weeks. He visited the ruined abbey of Arbroath, once held by
Cardinal Beaton, “for the third time, the first being--_eheu!_” On the
first visit he had been in the company of his unforgotten love: to be
absent from her, and divided from her by the river of death, was not to
be out of mind of her. He studied the strange ways of the Shetland and
Orkney islanders--we see the results in _The Pirate_; he examined the
extraordinary towers of the fourth to ninth centuries A.D. called
_Brochs_; he took notes of a superstitious practice which strongly
resembles an usage of the natives of Central Australia: he heard of the
great sea serpent’s recent visit to the coast, and he was presented with
a collection of neolithic axe heads. He met a witch of great age who
sold, as Æolus in the _Odyssey_ gave, favourable breezes to seamen. He
visited many island scenes of the distresses of Prince Charles, in 1746,
and at Dunvegan saw the Fairy Flag of M’Leod, and heard M’Crimmon’s
Lament played by a descendant of the M’Crimmon who was the only man
slain in the rout of the M’Leods at Moy. He beheld Loch
Coruisk--admirably described in _The Lord of the Isles_--and the ruins
of Ardtornish Castle, in which occurs the opening scene of that poem. On
September 4, he was saddened by news of the death of one of his dearest
friends, the Duchess of Buccleuch, and, on September 8, left the yacht
for Glasgow.
[Sidenote: “WAVERLEY”]
In Edinburgh, on his way to Abbotsford, Scott found Constable about to
publish the third edition of _Waverley_--three thousand copies, at a
guinea, had already been disposed of, or were in the way of
disappearing. This was at that time an unexampled success for a new and
anonymous novel, unbacked by the favouring breezes of the modern puff
preliminary. The book, uncut and in three grey-clad volumes, is now
esteemed at a very high rate by bibliomaniacs. In most cases, purchasers
had the novels “murderously half-bound in calf,” and much cut down; and,
of _Waverley_ in particular, copies of the first edition are seldom
found in the original state. Constable had refused to give £1,000 for
the whole copyright, and rather ruefully divided the large profits with
the author.
At first only three people were in Scott’s confidence as to the
authorship of _Waverley_: they were Ballantyne, Erskine and Morritt.
Gradually, as the novels flowed on and on, about twenty persons were
entrusted with the secret, which could be no real secret to any one of
sense who had read the poems and the notes to the poems. As for Scott’s
intimates, they recognized him in dozens of details and traces. But the
public, not unnaturally, wished to believe that they had a new
entertainer. Thomas Scott, Jeffrey (of all people!), Erskine, and a
clergyman who lay under a very black cloud, were among the persons
suspected of the authorship.
It was vain to say that only Scott knew so much of Highlands and
Lowlands as the author knew: that no other man had his acquaintance with
the personal side of old history, that no other could have written the
snatches of verse in the romances. People enjoy a mystery, and Scott
enjoyed mystifying them, while his conscience permitted him a latitude
in denial warranted by the maxims of Father Holt, S.J., in _Esmond_. As
a loyal citizen might blamelessly say that King Charles was _not_ in the
oak tree--His Majesty being private there, and invisible to loyal
eyes--so Scott, if pressed, averred that he had no hand in the novels,
often adding that, even if he had, he would still deny his authorship.
Casuists may blame or exonerate him (Cardinal Newman discussed the
situation): it is certain that no man is bound to incriminate himself.
Jeffrey detected Scott, of course, and reviewed him with the usual
grotesque assumption of superiority. _O le grand homme, rien ne lui peut
plaire!_ The _Quarterly_ dullard probably did not recognize Scott’s
hand, and spoke of the Scots tongue as “a dark dialogue” (so in
Lockhart!) “of Anglified Erse,” a deathless exhibition of stupid
ignorance.
[Sidenote: THE NOVELS]
The general characteristics, the merits and defects of the _Waverley_
novels may be reviewed, before we approach the history of each example
in its turn. In an age when an acquaintance with FitzGerald’s Rubáiyàt
of Omar Kháyyám, an exhaustive ignorance of all literature of the past,
and an especial contempt for Scott, whom FitzGerald so intensely
admired, are the equipment of many critics, we must be very cautious in
praising the _Waverley_ novels. They are not the work of a passionate, a
squalid, or a totally uneducated genius. They are not the work of any
Peeping Tom who studies woman in her dressing-room, and tries to spy or
smell out the secrets of the eternally feminine. We have novels
to-day--novels by males--full of clever spyings and dissections of
womankind, which Scott would have thrown into the fire. “I think,”
writes Mr. Hutton, “that the deficiency of his pictures of women ...
should be greatly attributed to his natural chivalry.... He hardly
ventured, as it were, in his tenderness for them, to look deeply into
their little weaknesses and intricacies of character.”
Scott’s novels, again, are not the work of a man who desires to enforce
his social, or religious, or political ideals and ideas in his romances.
Like almost all great novels, except _Tom Jones_, they do not possess
carefully elaborated plots, any more than do most of the dramas of
Shakespeare. They are far from being the work of a conscientious
stylist, beating his brains for hours to find _le mot propre_, usually
the least natural word for any mortal to use in the circumstances. But
once Scott _did_ hunt for _le mot propre_, in Scots. He could not find
it, and came out to the lawn at Abbotsford where some workmen were
engaged. He turned a bucket upside down, and asked the men, “What did I
do just now?” “Ye _whummled_ the bowie,” said the men, and Scott had
found the word he wanted--to “whummle.” Mr. Saintsbury has a little
excursus on this word, “whummle,” or “whammle,” which Scott, he has
heard, picked up from a woman in the street. But every Scot knows it,
for to “whummle the bannock,” in the presence of a Menteith, was a
proverbial insult, as Menteith, or one of his men, is said, by whummling
the loaf, to have given the signal of betrayal, when English soldiers
lay in wait before seizing Sir William Wallace.
[Sidenote: THE NOVELS]
Far from being a conscientious stylist, Scott not infrequently proves
the truth of his own remark to Lockhart, that he never learned grammar.
I have found five “whiches” in a sentence of his, and five “_ques_” in a
sentence by Alexandre Dumas, his pupil and rival. Dumas had more of the
humour of Scott than Scott had of the wit of Dumas. Many parts of his
tales are prolix: his openings, as a rule, are dull. His heroes and
heroines often speak in the stilted manner of Miss Burney’s Lord
Orville, a manner (if we may trust memoirs and books like Boswell’s
_Johnson_, and Walpole’s _Letters_), in which no men and women of mould
ever did talk, even in the eighteenth century. But Catherine Glover, in
_The Fair Maid of Perth_, usually speaks from stilts. These pompous
discourses in which the speaker often talks of himself in the third
person, were in vogue, in novel writing, we do not know why, and they
are a stone of stumbling to readers who do not blench when a modern hero
mouths fustian in the tone of a demoniac at large. All these
unfashionable traits are to be found up and down the _Waverley_ novels,
combined with descriptive passages that, to some, are a weariness. These
are frank confessions from a zealot who has read most of the _Waverley_
novels many times, from childhood up to age, and finds them better,
finds fresh beauties in them, every time that he reads them. But there
are more serious defects than old-fashionedness, and prolixities (which
may be skipped), and laxity of style, and errors in grammar. There are
faults in “artistry,” and nobody knew them better, or put his finger on
them more ruthlessly, or apologized for them more ingenuously than Scott
himself.
[Sidenote: THE NOVELS]
The Introductions to the Novels have frightened away many a painful
would-be student who has been told that, if you read a book, you must
read every line of it--from cover to cover. This is an old moral maxim
invented and handed on by the class of mortals who are not born
readers, and regard literature with moral earnestness as a duty, though
a painful duty. There must be no flinching! Scott, like Dr. Johnson,
“tore the heart out of a book,” rapidly assimilating what he needed, and
“skipping” what he did not need. He wrote his Introductions for the
curious literary student, not for the novel reader and the general
public. Doubtless he expected the general public to skip the
Introductions, and did not reflect that they would trouble persons who
adhere to the puritanic rule against what they call “desultory reading.”
But whosoever has any interest in Scott’s own theory of the conduct of
the historical novel, and in his confession of his own faults, cannot
afford to overlook the original Introduction of 1822 to _The Fortunes of
Nigel_. In these pages Captain Clutterbuck describes an interview with
“The Eidolon, or representative vision of The Author of _Waverley_.”
Scott, in fact, anticipates the modern “interview,” but he interviews
himself, and does the business better than the suave modern reporter.
After confessing that _The Monastery_, especially the White Lady of
Avenel, is rather a failure, Scott is asked by Captain Clutterbuck
whether his new book meets every single demand of the critics, whether
it opens strikingly, proceeds naturally, and ends happily, for critics
then applauded what they now denounce--“a happy ending.” Scott replies
that Hercules might produce a romance “which should glide, and gush, and
never pause, and widen, and deepen, and all the rest on’t,” but that he
cannot. “There never was a novel written on this plan while the world
stood.” “Pardon me--_Tom Jones_,” says the Captain. There was also the
_Odyssey_, on which Wolf, the great sceptic as to the unity of the
_Iliad_, bestowed the praise of masterly composition which the Captain
gives to _Tom Jones_. But several modern German critics and Father
Browne of the Society of Jesus, assure us that the plot of the _Odyssey_
is a very bad piece of composition, a dawdling bit of patchwork by many
hands, in many ages, strung together by a relatively late Greek
“botcher,” though why he took the trouble nobody can imagine. Thus do
critical opinions differ, and a fair critic informs me that “_Tom Jones_
is the stupidest book in the English language.” Yet, if the _Odyssey_
triumphed over the Zoili of three thousand years, while _Tom Jones_ was
an undisputed masterpiece for a century and a half, we may doubt whether
the verdict of time and of the world is to be upset for ever by the
censures of a few moderns. To them, and to the contemners of Scott, we
may say, as Cromwell said to the Commissioners of the General Assembly,
“Brethren, in the bowels of Christ, believe that it is possible you may
be mistaken.” Scott remarks that, in Fielding’s masterpiece, the Novel,
for excellence of composition, “challenged a comparison with the Epic.”
Other “great masters,” like Smollett and Le Sage, “have been satisfied
if they amuse the reader on the road.” It is enough for himself if his
“scenes, unlaboured and loosely put together, have sufficient interest
in them to amuse in one corner the pain of the body; in another to
relieve anxiety of mind; in a third place to unwrinkle a brow bent with
the furrows of daily toil; in another to fill the place of bad thoughts,
or to suggest better; in yet another to induce an idler to study the
history of his country; in all ... to furnish harmless amusement.”
Such is Scott’s reply, in anticipation, to the censure of Carlyle, that
he has not a message, and a mission, and so forth. His mission was to
add enormously to human happiness: his message was that of honour,
courage, endurance, love, and kindness. The Captain, however, doubts not
that the new book needs an apology, and that the story “is hastily
huddled up,”--a favourite criticism of Scott’s friend, Lady Louisa
Steuart. Scott might have replied that his romances are not so hastily
“huddled up” at the close as many of Shakespeare’s plays.
[Sidenote: THE NOVELS]
But it is curious that Hogg represents Scott as criticising _his_ tales
exactly as Captain Clutterbuck and Lady Louisa censured Scott’s own
romances.
“Well, Mr. Hogg, I have read over your proofs with a great deal of
pleasure, and, I confess, with some little portion of dread. In the
first place, the meeting of the two princesses at Castle Weiry is
excellent. I have not seen any modern thing more truly dramatic. The
characters are strongly marked, old Peter Chisholme’s in particular. Ah!
man, what you might have made of that with a little more refinement,
care, and patience! But it is always the same with you, just hurrying on
from one vagary to another, without consistency or proper arrangement.”
“Dear Mr. Scott, a man canna do the thing that he canna do.”
“Yes, but you _can_ do it. Witness your poems, where the arrangements
are all perfect and complete; but in your prose works, with the
exception of a few short tales, you seem to write merely by random,
without once considering what you are going to write about.”
“You are not often wrong, Mr. Scott, and you were never righter in your
life than you are now, for when I write the first line of a tale or
novel, I know not what the second is to be, and it is the same way in
every sentence throughout. When my tale is traditionary, the work is
easy, as I then see my way before me, though the tradition be ever so
short, but in all my prose works of imagination, knowing little of the
world, I sail on without star or compass.”
In the conversation with the Captain, Scott presently shows that, as
regards composition, the Sheriff and the Shepherd sailed in the same
rudderless boat. “You should take time at least to arrange your story,”
says the Captain. Scott replies, as Hogg replied to himself, that “A man
canna do what he canna do.”
“That is a sore point with me, my son. Believe me, I have not been
fool enough to neglect ordinary precautions. I have repeatedly laid
down my future work to scale, divided it into volumes and chapters,
and endeavoured to construct a story which I meant would evolve
itself gradually and strikingly, maintain suspense, and stimulate
curiosity; and which, finally, should terminate in a striking
catastrophe. But I think there is a demon who seats himself on the
feather of my pen when I begin to write, and leads it astray from
the purpose. Characters expand under my hand; incidents are
multiplied; the story lingers, while the materials increase; my
regular mansion turns out a Gothic anomaly, and the work is closed
long before I have attained the point I proposed.
[Sidenote: THE NOVELS]
“_Captain._--Resolution and determined forbearance might remedy
that evil.
“_Author._--Alas! my dear sir, you do not know the force of
paternal affection. When I light on such a character as Bailie
Jarvie, or Dalgetty, my imagination brightens, and my conception
becomes clearer at every step which I take in his company, although
it leads me many a weary mile away from the regular road, and
forces me to leap hedge and ditch to get back into the route again.
If I resist the temptation, as you advise me, my thoughts become
prosy, flat, and dull; I write painfully to myself, and under a
consciousness of flagging which makes me flag still more; the
sunshine with which fancy had invested the incidents, departs from
them, and leaves every thing dull and gloomy. I am no more the same
author I was in my better mood, than the dog in a wheel, condemned
to go round and round for hours, is like the same dog merrily
chasing his own tail, and gambolling in all the frolic of
unrestrained freedom. In short, sir, on such occasions, I think I
am bewitched.”
Scott next professes that he cannot write plays, as the Captain urges
him to do, if he would. The applauded scraps of “Old Play” which head
many of his chapters, are borrowed from manuscript dramas about which he
tells a fable. As to the charge of making money--
_O, if it were a mean thing,
The Gentles would not use it;
And if it were ungodly,
The clergy would refuse it._
Moreover, “No man of honour, genius, or spirit, would make the mere love
of gain, the chief, far less the only, purpose of his labours. For
myself, I am not displeased to find the game a winning one; yet while I
pleased the public, I should probably continue it merely for the
pleasure of playing; for I have felt as strongly as most folks that love
of composition, which is perhaps the strongest of all instincts, driving
the author to the pen, the painter to the palette, often without either
the chance of fame or the prospect of reward. Perhaps I have said too
much of this.”
[Sidenote: THE NOVELS]
Such is Scott’s confession and apology. To plan a work to scale, to
pursue a predetermined course, does not “set his genius,” as Alan Breck
says. Nor did it set the genius of an artist so conscientious as Alan’s
creator, Mr. Stevenson. The pre-arranged programme or _scenario_ of his
_Kidnapped_, was very unlike the actual romance as it stands. The
preeminent merit of Scott was that of a creator of characters. These
personages became living, and, because they were living, spontaneous and
uncontrollable. What began as a “Legend of Montrose,” left the great
Marquis in the background, and became the Odyssey of Thackeray’s
favourite, Dugald Dalgetty, “of Drumthwacket that should be,” that
inimitable and immortal man of the sword. So it is throughout the
_Waverley_ novels. The characters _will_ “gang their ain gait.” They
come across the author’s fancy, as Mrs. Gamp, who had no part in the
original plan of _Martin Chuzzlewit_, came across the fancy of Dickens,
and they work their will on plot and author. In fact, the almost
mechanical merit of construction or _charpentage_ is rarely found in the
great novels of the great masters. _Vanity Fair_ “has no outline,” as
Mr. Mantalini says of the lady of rank, and, if _Pendennis_ “has an
outline, it is a demned outline.” Of _Esmond_ the motto may hold good--
_Servetur ad imum
Qualis ab incepto processerit, et sibi constet._
But this merit, from the days of Cervantes downwards, has been the least
sought after by the greatest novelists. Scott tells us that at night he
would leave off writing without an idea as to how he was to get his
characters out of a quandary, and that, in the half-hour after waking,
all would become clear to him. Charlotte Brontë makes a similar
confession. In his manuscript, Scott never goes back to delete and
alter--better would it have been had he taken the trouble. But his
proof-sheets show that he took a good deal of pains in adding and
improving, especially in that impeccable little _chef d’oeuvre_,
“Wandering Willie’s Tale” in _Redgauntlet_. We are thus obliged to
confess that he was on occasion culpably indolent. Mr. Stevenson cites a
romantic passage of _Guy Mannering_ in which Scott, rather than go back
and indicate, in an earlier passage, the presence of a fountain which he
suddenly finds that he needs, hurries forward and drags the fountain
into a long, trailing, shapeless sentence. _Guy Mannering_, we know, was
“written in six weeks at Christmas,” for the purpose of “refreshing the
machine.” Undeniably it would be better, good as it is, had a fortnight
been given to revision.
[Sidenote: THE NOVELS]
Scott’s “architectonic,” his principles in the composition of historical
novels, are well known, and the method was all his own. Others before
him had attempted the historical novel, but wholly without his knowledge
of history, and of the actual way of living and thinking in various
periods of the past. He first made the dry bones of history live, and
Macaulay and Froude follow his method, perhaps rather too closely.
Several of Mr. Froude’s most dramatic scenes never, as a matter of fact,
occurred. It is probable that a too hasty glance at notes from original
documents misled him, and his dramatic instinct did the rest, without a
backward look at the original papers, a look which would have made
re-writing necessary--and caused the dramatic situation to disappear!
Scott, of course, wrote novels under no historical trammels of accuracy.
He deliberately committed the most glaring anachronisms, bringing the
dead Amy Robsart to life long after her mysterious death, introducing
Shakespeare as a successful dramatist at an age when he was creeping
unwillingly to school--and then Scott would confess his anachronisms in
a note. Modern historical novelists, though they write from the results
of “cram,” and not from a mind already charged with history, try at
least to subject themselves to the actual circumstances of the past, and
not to subject historical circumstances to themselves. They dare not
bring Charles II to Woodstock, in his flight after Worcester, because it
is too well known that the King did not make by way of Woodstock for the
south coast. On such points of composition, Scott was as reckless as
Turner was in landscape; both were satisfied, as the reader usually is,
if they got their effects. Mr. Swinburne, in his drama of _Mary Stuart_,
is not more nice. Lady Boyne (Mary Beaton) was never near Mary Stuart in
England, though a play turns on her presence there.
[Sidenote: THE NOVELS]
Scott’s plan was never to make a famous character of history the central
personage of his tale. Thus he never could have written a novel of which
the fortunes of Mary Stuart were the central interest. He deemed that
the facts were too well known to be trifled with, and that, in such
matters, romance could not cope with actuality. Thus the unhappy Queen
appears as a subordinate character--not as heroine, that is to
say--while, in the scene in which the night of Darnley’s murder is
recalled to her memory, she reaches the height of tragedy. These two
principles, not to make the protagonists of history his central
characters; not to cope with the records of actual events, are the
guiding, if negative principles of Scott. He invents heroes and heroines
who never existed, nor could have existed. There could be no Henry
Morton in 1679! He uses them mainly as pivots round which the characters
revolve. The heroes and heroines themselves, as a rule, interest their
creator, and his readers, but little. What can you make of a _jeune
premier_? He must be brave, modest, handsome, good, and not too
clever--an ideal son-in-law, and he must be a true lover. Scott
pronounced his earliest hero, Edward Waverley, “a sneaking piece of
imbecility.... I am a bad hand at depicting a hero properly so-called.”
True, but what kind of hero is Martin Chuzzlewit, or Clive Newcome, and
is there any hero at all in _Vanity Fair_? Tom Jones and Captain Booth
take leading parts, but are nothing less than heroic. They are
_characters_, however, and Scott’s heroes, except Quentin Durward,
Roland Graeme, Harry Gow, and the Master of Ravenswood (_un beau
ténébreux_), are not of much account as characters.
Unlike Thackeray, Dickens, and possibly Fielding, Scott never drew his
hero from himself. In politics they are usually what he was--_when he
wrote history_--they take the middle path, they are in the sober _juste
milieu_. Waverley is only a Jacobite to please his lady; Henry Morton is
an extremely moderate constitutional Whig. Nobody can take much interest
in Vanbeest Brown, the wandering heir of _Guy Mannering_, despite his
proficiency on the flageolet. When we have a true hero like Montrose, we
are scarcely allowed to look on his face and hear his voice. Ivanhoe,
like an honourable gentleman, curbs his passion for Rebecca, and is true
to Rowena, though we see that the memory of Rebecca never leaves his
heart. Ivanhoe behaves as, in his circumstances, Scott would have
behaved, in place of giving way to passion. Novels of the most poignant
interest are constantly beginning, in private life, and then break off,
because the living characters are persons of honour and self-control.
_Ivanhoe_ would have been more to the taste of to-day, if the hero had
eloped with the fair Hebrew--but then, Ivanhoe and Rowena are persons of
honour and self-control. I found, in Scott’s papers, a letter from an
enthusiastic schoolboy, a stranger--“Oh, Sir Walter, how _could_ you
kill the gallant cavalier, and give the lady to the crop-eared Whig?”
This was the remark of the natural man. Scott kept the natural man in
subjection. The heroes, except when they are “bonny fechters” like Harry
Gow, Roland Graeme, and Quentin Durward--that canny soldier of
fortune--are little more than parts of the machinery, and modes of
introducing the pell-mell of nominally subordinate, but really essential
characters of all ranks and degrees--the undying friends with whom Scott
brings us acquainted.
[Sidenote: THE NOVELS]
The heroines, though it seems a paradox to say so, are really more
successful than the heroes. In _The Heart of Midlothian_ there is no
hero except the heroine, Jeanie Deans, certainly one of the great
creations of literature. Scott has made goodness without beauty, without
overmastering tragedy, without “wallowing naked in the pathetic,” and
without passion, as interesting as Becky Sharp. Who has rivalled this
feat? Rose Bradwardine, with her innocent self-betrayed affection, is an
elder sister of Catherine Morland in _Northanger Abbey_. Though rather
stilted, in the manner of the period, Rebecca is a noble creature.
Catherine Seyton, of _The Abbot_, is a delightfully spirited girl, and
Diana Vernon is peerless. Our hearts warm even to the prematurely
puritan Fair Maid of Perth, when she runs, with loose hair, like a wild
creature, to her lover’s door, on the false news of his death. Fair eyes
were wont to weep over Lucy Ashton, the Ophelia of Scott; but now Lucy
is out of fashion though her end, surely, is poignant enough, when the
weak mind is broken, and the animal stands at bay, like a wild cat, and
breaks the hunter’s toils, and dies a maiden in the bridal chamber.
* * * * *
As Molière never had the heart to draw a jealous woman, among all his
pictures of men who knew, like himself, the torments of jealousy, so
Scott never had the heart to draw a young and beautiful woman who is
wicked. This ancient familiar source of poignant interest he passes by,
out of his great chivalry. There was nothing to prevent him from writing
a romance on the passionate, wretched tale of the once beautiful Ulrica,
in Ivanhoe, a fair traitress driven on the winds of revenge, treachery,
parricide, and incest. Here was a theme for a “realistic” novel of
England after the Conquest, but Scott sketches it lightly, as a
Thyestean horror in the background. In his work such a piece of
“realism” stands alone, like the story of Phoenix in Homer’s work (in
the Ninth Book of the _Iliad_). Both artists, Scott and Homer, had a
sense of reverence of human things: they did not lack the imagination
necessary for the portrayal of the evil and terrible, but they did not
seek success in that popular region. Scott was no prude, but he held the
young in reverence, knowing that among them he must have many readers.
[Sidenote: THE NOVELS]
I am unable to think the worse of him because he imposed on himself
limitations which Byron triumphantly broke through, though Scott’s
limits now militate against a high appreciation of his work by the
admirers of M. Guy de Maupassant and M. Catulle Mendès. “A man canna do
what he canna do,” and Scott could not have treated the favourite themes
of these masters, if he would. He had funds enough to draw upon in human
life and character, without hunting for personages and situations in
dark malodorous corners. The glory of his work is, of course, not merely
his wealth of incident, and his natural gift of story telling, but his
crowd of characters, from his princes, such as James VI, an immortal
picture, Louis XI, Elizabeth, Mary, Charles II in flight or in such
prosperity as he loved, to his Highland chiefs, his ploughmen, his
lairds, Bucklaw and old Redgauntlet, the persecutor; his copper captains
in Alsatia, his baillies, his Covenanting preachers, his Claverhouse,
his serving men, his Andrew Fairservice, his yeomen, his Dandie Dinmont,
with the Dinmont family and terriers, his wild women, Meg Merrilees, and
Madge Wildfire; his smugglers, his lawyers, from Pleydell to the elder
Fairford, and even his bores, who, like Miss Austen’s bores, are
certainly too much with us, who can number the throng of such
characters, all living and delightful? The novels are _vécus_: the
author has, in imagination, lived closely and long with his people,
whether of his own day, or of the past, before he laid brush to canvas
to execute their portraits. It is in this capacity, as a creator of a
vast throng of living people of every grade, and every variety of
nature, humour, and temperament, that Scott, among British writers, is
least remote from Shakespeare. No changes in taste and fashion as
regards matters unessential, no laxities and indolence of his own, no
feather-headed folly, or leaden stupidity of new generations can deprive
Scott of these unfading laurels. The novels that charmed Europe and
America, that were the inspiration of Dumas, that have been
affectionately discussed by the greatest of modern British statesmen,
were as conspicuously open to criticism, and were as severely handled by
reviewers, in Scott’s own day as in our own. But, if we may judge by
endless new editions of all sorts, and at various prices, the
_Waverley_ novels are not less popular now, than are, for their little
span, the most successful flights of all-daring ignorance and bombastic
presumption. It was on his characters, especially on his characters
sketched among his own people, that Scott believed the interest of his
romances to depend. He generously recognized Miss Edgeworth as his
teacher: “If I could but hit Miss Edgeworth’s wonderful power of
vivifying all her persons, and making them live as _beings_ in your
mind, I should not despair,” he said.
Meanwhile, outside of “the big bow wow” line, he regarded Miss Austen as
his superior, nor was he wrong; that queen of fiction has come to her
own again. In his brief, and on the whole admirable, _Scott_, the late
Mr. Hutton defended Scott’s power of character-drawing better than I can
hope to do, if it needs defence, against Mr. Carlyle, who had some
slight private bitterness against Sir Walter, on a matter of an
unanswered letter. He calls Scott’s men and women “little more than
mechanical cases, deceptively painted automatons.” This is the Carlyle
who conceded to Cardinal Newman the possession of intellectual powers
equivalent to those of a rabbit; _un vrai lapin_! Scott “fashions his
characters from the skin inwards, never getting near the heart of them.”
Never near the broken
[Sidenote: THE NOVELS]
[Illustration: The Chantrey Bust of Sir Walter Scott, 1820.]
stoical heart of Saunders Mucklebackit; of the fallen Bradwardine, happy
in unsullied honour; never near the heart of the maddened Peter Peebles;
never near the flawless Christian heart of Bessie M’Clure; or the heart
of dauntless remorse of Nancy Ewart; or the heart of sacrificed love in
Diana Vernon; or the stout heart of Dalgetty in the dungeon of
Inveraray; or the secret soul of Mary Stuart, revealed when she is
reminded of Bastian’s bridal mask, and the deed of Kirk o’ Field? _Quid
plura_, Thomas Carlyle wrote splenetic nonsense: “he was very capable of
having it happen to him.”