_By the Author of "Eugene Aram."_
The blow is struck--the lyre is shattered--the music is hushed at
length. The greatest--the most various--the most commanding genius of
modern times has left us to seek for that successor to his renown which,
in all probability, a remote generation alone will furnish forth. It is
true that we have been long prepared for the event--it does not fall
upon us suddenly--leaf after leaf was stripped from that noble tree
before it was felled to the earth at last;--our sympathy in his decay
has softened us to the sorrow for his death. It is not now our intention
to trace the character or to enumerate the works of the great man whose
career is run;--to every eye that reads--every ear that hears--every
heart that remembers, this much at least, of his character is already
known,--that he had all the exuberance of genius and none of its
excesses; that he was at once equitable and generous--that his heart was
ever open to charity--that his life has probably been shortened by his
scrupulous regard for justice. His career was one splendid refutation of
the popular fallacy, that genius has of necessity vices--that its light
must be meteoric--and its courses wayward and uncontrolled. He has left
mankind two great lessons,--we scarcely know which is the most valuable.
He has taught us how much delight one human being can confer upon the
world; he has taught us also that the imagination may aspire to the
wildest flights without wandering into error. Of whom else among our
great list of names--the heir-looms of our nation--can we say that he
has left us everything to admire, and nothing to forgive?
It is in four different paths of intellectual eminence that Sir Walter
Scott has won his fame; as a poet, a biographer, an historian, and a
novellist. It is not now a time (with the great man's clay scarce cold)
to enter into the niceties of critical discussion. We cannot now weigh,
and sift, and compare. We feel too deeply at this moment to reason
well---but we ourselves would incline to consider him greatest as a
poet. Never, indeed, has there been a poet so thoroughly Homeric as
Scott--the battle--the feast--the council--the guard-room at
Stirling--the dying warrior at Flodden--the fierce Bertram speeding up
the aisle--all are Homeric;--all live--move--breathe and burn--alike
poetry, but alike life! There is this difference, too, marked and
prominent--between his verse and his prose;--the first is emphatically
the verse of Scott--the latter (we mean in its style) may be the prose
of any one--the striking originality, the daring boldness, the
astonishing vigour of the style, in the _Lay of the Last Minstrel_,
are lost in _The Antiquary and Guy Mannering_.
Scott may be said, in prose, to have _no style_. There are those,
we know, who call this very absence of style a merit--we will not
dispute it: if it be so, Scott is the first great prose writer from
Bacon to Gibbon,--nay, from Herodotus, in Greek, to Paul Courier, in
French--who has laid claim to it. For our own part, we think him great,
in spite of the want of style, and not because of it. As a biographer,
he has been unfortunate in his subjects; the two most important of the
various lives he has either delineated or sketched--that of Dryden and
that of Swift--are men, to whose inexpiable baseness genius could
neither give the dignity of virtue nor the interest of error.
As an historian, we confess that we prize him more highly than as a
biographer: it is true that the same faults are apparent in both, but
there is in the grand History of Napoleon more scope for redeeming
beauties. His great, his unrivalled, excellence in description is here
brought into full and ample display: his battles are vivid, with colours
which no other historian ever could command. And all the errors of the
history still leave scenes and touches of unrivalled majesty to the
book.
As a novelist, Scott has been blamed for not imparting a more useful
moral to his fictions, and for dwelling with too inconsiderate an
interest on the chivalric illusions of the past. To charges of this
nature all writers are liable. Mankind are divided into two classes; and
he who belongs to the one will ever incur the reproach of not seeing
through the medium of the other. Certain it is, that we, with utterly
different notions on political truths from the great writer who is no
more, might feel some regret--some natural pain--that that cause which
we believe the best, was not honoured by his advocacy; but when we
reflect on the _real_ influence of his works, we are satisfied they
have been directed to the noblest ends, and have embraced the largest
circle of human interests. We do not speak of the delight he has poured
forth over the earth--of the lonely hours he has charmed--of the sad
hearts he has beguiled--of the beauty and the music which he has
summoned to a world where all travail and none repose; this, indeed, is
something--this, indeed, is a moral--this, indeed, has been a benefit
to mankind. And this is a new corroborant of one among the noblest of
intellectual truths, viz. that the books which please, are always books
that, in one sense, benefit; and that the work which is largely and
permanently popular--which sways, moulds, and softens the universal
heart--cannot appeal to vulgar and unworthy passions (such appeals are
never widely or long triumphant!); the delight it occasions is a proof
of the moral it inspires.
But this power to charm and to beguile is not that moral excellence to
which we refer. Scott has been the first great genius--Fielding alone
excepted--who invited our thorough and uncondescending sympathy to the
wide mass of the human family--who has _stricken_ (for in this
artificial world it requires an effort) into our hearts a love and a
respect for those chosen from the people. Shakspeare has not done
this--Shakspeare paints the follies of the mob with a strong and
unfriendly hand. Where, in Skakspeare, is there a Jeanie Deans? Take up
which you will of those numerous works which have appeared, from
_Waverley_ to the _Chronicles of the Canongate_,--open where
you please, you will find portraits from the people--and your interest
keeping watch beside the poor man's hearth. Not, in Scott, as they were
in the dramatists of our language, are the peasant, the artificer, the
farmer, dragged on the stage merely to be laughed at for their brogue,
and made to seem ridiculous because they are useful.
He paints them, it is true, in their natural language, but the language
is subservient to the character; he does not bow the man to the phrase,
but the phrase to the man. Neither does he flatter on the one hand, as
he does not slight on the other. Unlike the maudlin pastoralists of
France he contents himself with the simple truth--he contrasts the dark
shadows of Meg Merrilies, or of Edie Ochiltree, with the holy and pure
lights that redeem and sanctify them--he gives us the poor, even to the
gipsey and the beggar, as they really are--contented, if our interest is
excited, and knowing that nature is sufficient to excite it. From the
palaces of kings--from the tents of warriors, he comes--equally at home
with man in all aspects--to the cotter's hearth:--he bids us turn from
the pomp of the Plantagenets to bow the knee to the poor Jew's
daughter--he makes us sicken at the hollowness of the royal Rothsay, to
sympathize with the honest love of Hugh the smith. No never was there
one--not even Burns himself--who forced us more intimately to
acknowledge, or more deeply to feel, that
"The rank is but the guinea stamp,
The man's the gowd, for a' that."
* * * * *
Scott, is not, we apprehend, justly liable to the charge of wanting a
sound moral--even a great _political_ moral--(and political morals
are the greatest of all)--in the general tenor of works which have
compelled the highest classes to examine and respect the lowest. In
this, with far less learning, far less abstract philosophy, than
Fielding, he is only exceeded by him in one character--(and that,
indeed, the most admirable in English fiction)--the character of Parson
Adams. Jeanie Deans is worth a thousand such as Fanny Andrews. Fielding,
Le Sage, and Cervantes are the only three writers, since the world
began, with whom, as a novelist, he can be compared. And perhaps he
excels them, as Voltaire excelled all the writers of his nation, not by
the superior merits of one work, but by the brilliant aggregate of many.
_Tom Jones, Gil Blas, Don Quixote_, are, without doubt, greater,
_much_ greater, productions than Waverley; but the _authors_
of _Tom Jones, Gil Blas_, and even of _Don Quixote_, have not
manifested the same fertile and mighty genius as _author_ of the
Waverley Novels.
And _that_ genius--seemingly so inexhaustible--is quenched at
length! We can be charmed no more--the eloquent tongue is mute--the
master's wand is broken up--the right hand hath forgot its cunning-the
cord that is loosened was indeed of silver--and the bowl that is broken
at the dark well was of gold beyond all price.
* * * * *
When a great man dies, he leaves a chasm which eternity cannot fill.
Others succeed to his fame--but never to the exact place which he held
in the world's eye;--they may be greater than the one we have lost--but
they are not he. Shakspeare built not his throne on the same site as
Homer--nor Scott on that whence Shakspeare looked down upon the
universe. The gap which Scott leaves in the world is the token of the
space he filled in the homage of his times. A hundred ages hence our
posterity will still see that wide interval untenanted--a vast and
mighty era in the intellectual world, which will prove how spacious were
"the city and the temple, whose summit has reached to Heaven."
_New Monthly Magazine_.
* * * * *