Sir Walter has found out (oh, rare discovery!) that facts are better than
fiction; that there is no romance like the romance of real life; and that
if we can but arrive at what men feel, do, and say in striking and
singular situations, the result will be "more lively, audible, and full of
vent," than the fine-spun cobwebs of the brain. With reverence be it
spoken, he is like the man who having to imitate the squeaking of a pig
upon the stage, brought the animal under his coat with him. Our author has
conjured up the actual people he has to deal with, or as much as he could
get of them, in "their habits as they lived." He has ransacked old
chronicles, and poured the contents upon his page; he has squeezed out
musty records; he has consulted wayfaring pilgrims, bed-rid sybils; he has
invoked the spirits of the air; he has conversed with the living and the
dead, and let them tell their story their own way; and by borrowing of
others, has enriched his own genius with everlasting variety, truth, and
freedom. He has taken his materials from the original, authentic sources,
in large concrete masses, and not tampered with or too much frittered them
away. He is only the amanuensis of truth and history. It is impossible to
say how fine his writings in consequence are, unless we could describe how
fine nature is. All that portion of the history of his country that he has
touched upon (wide as the scope is) the manners, the personages, the
events, the scenery, lives over again in his volumes. Nothing is
wanting--the illusion is complete. There is a hurtling in the air, a
trampling of feet upon the ground, as these perfect representations of
human character or fanciful belief come thronging back upon our
imaginations. We will merely recall a few of the subjects of his pencil to
the reader's recollection; for nothing we could add, by way of note or
commendation, could make the impression more vivid.
There is (first and foremost, because the earliest of our acquaintance)
the Baron of Bradwardine, stately, kind-hearted, whimsical, pedantic; and
Flora MacIvor (whom even _we_ forgive for her Jacobitism), the fierce Vich
Ian Vohr, and Evan Dhu, constant in death, and Davie Gellatly roasting his
eggs or turning his rhymes with restless volubility, and the two
stag-hounds that met Waverley, as fine as ever Titian painted, or Paul
Veronese:--then there is old Balfour of Burley, brandishing his sword and
his Bible with fire-eyed fury, trying a fall with the insolent, gigantic
Bothwell at the 'Change-house, and vanquishing him at the noble battle of
Loudon-hill; there is Bothwell himself, drawn to the life, proud, cruel,
selfish, profligate, but with the love-letters of the gentle Alice
(written thirty years before), and his verses to her memory found in his
pocket after his death: in the same volume of _Old Mortality_ is that lone
figure, like a figure in Scripture, of the woman sitting on the stone at
the turning to the mountain, to warn Burley that there is a lion in his
path; and the fawning Claverhouse, beautiful as a panther, smooth-looking,
blood-spotted; and the fanatics, Macbriar and Mucklewrath, crazed with
zeal and sufferings; and the inflexible Morton, and the faithful Edith,
who refused to "give her hand to another while her heart was with her
lover in the deep and dead sea." And in the _Heart of Mid Lothian_ we have
Effie Deans (that sweet, faded flower) and Jeanie, her more than sister,
and old David Deans, the patriarch of St. Leonard's Crags, and Butler, and
Dumbiedikes, eloquent in his silence, and Mr. Bartoline Saddle-tree and
his prudent helpmate, and Porteous swinging in the wind, and Madge
Wildfire, full of finery and madness, and her ghastly mother.--Again,
there is Meg Merrilies, standing on her rock, stretched on her bier with
"her head to the east," and Dirk Hatterick (equal to Shakspeare's Master
Barnardine), and Glossin, the soul of an attorney, and Dandy Dinmont, with
his terrier-pack and his pony Dumple, and the fiery Colonel Mannering, and
the modish old counsellor Pleydell, and Dominie Sampson,[138] and Rob Roy
(like the eagle in his eyry), and Baillie Nicol Jarvie, and the inimitable
Major Galbraith, and Rashleigh Osbaldistone, and Die Vernon, the best of
secret-keepers; and in the _Antiquary_, the ingenious and abstruse Mr.
Jonathan Oldbuck, and the old beadsman Edie Ochiltree, and that
preternatural figure of old Edith Elspeith, a living shadow, in whom the
lamp of life had been long extinguished, had it not been fed by remorse
and "thick-coming" recollections; and that striking picture of the effects
of feudal tyranny and fiendish pride, the unhappy Earl of Glenallan; and
the Black Dwarf, and his friend Habbie of the Heughfoot (the cheerful
hunter), and his cousin Grace Armstrong, fresh and laughing like the
morning; and the _Children of the Mist_, and the baying of the bloodhound
that tracks their steps at a distance (the hollow echoes are in our ears
now), and Amy and her hapless love, and the villain Varney, and the deep
voice of George of Douglas--and the immoveable Balafre, and Master Oliver
the Barber in Quentin Durward--and the quaint humour of the Fortunes of
Nigel, and the comic spirit of Peveril of the Peak--and the fine old
English romance of Ivanhoe. What a list of names! What a host of
associations! What a thing is human life! What a power is that of genius!
What a world of thought and feeling is thus rescued from oblivion! How
many hours of heartfelt satisfaction has our author given to the gay and
thoughtless! How many sad hearts has he soothed in pain and solitude! It
is no wonder that the public repay with lengthened applause and gratitude
the pleasure they receive. He writes as fast as they can read, and he does
not write himself down. He is always in the public eye, and we do not tire
of him. His worst is better than any other person's best. His
_back-grounds_ (and his later works are little else but back-grounds
capitally made out) are more attractive than the principal figures and
most complicated actions of other writers. His works (taken together) are
almost like a new edition of human nature. This is indeed to be an author!
The political bearing of the _Scotch Novels_ has been a considerable
recommendation to them. They are a relief to the mind, rarefied as it has
been with modern philosophy, and heated with ultra-radicalism. At a time
also, when we bid fair to revive the principles of the Stuarts, it is
interesting to bring us acquainted with their persons and misfortunes. The
candour of Sir Walter's historic pen levels our bristling prejudices on
this score, and sees fair play between Roundheads and Cavaliers, between
Protestant and Papist. He is a writer reconciling all the diversities of
human nature to the reader. He does not enter into the distinctions of
hostile sects or parties, but treats of the strength or the infirmity of
the human mind, of the virtues or vices of the human breast, as they are
to be found blended in the whole race of mankind. Nothing can show more
handsomely or be more gallantly executed. There was a talk at one time
that our author was about to take Guy Faux for the subject of one of his
novels, in order to put a more liberal and humane construction on the
Gunpowder Plot than our "No Popery" prejudices have hitherto permitted.
Sir Walter is a professed _clarifier_ of the age from the vulgar and still
lurking old-English antipathy to Popery and Slavery. Through some odd
process of _servile_ logic, it should seem, that in restoring the claims
of the Stuarts by the courtesy of romance, the House of Brunswick are more
firmly seated in point of fact, and the Bourbons, by collateral reasoning,
become legitimate! In any other point of view, we cannot possibly conceive
how Sir Walter imagines "he has done something to revive the declining
spirit of loyalty" by these novels. His loyalty is founded on _would-be_
treason: he props the actual throne by the shadow of rebellion. Does he
really think of making us enamoured of the "good old times" by the
faithful and harrowing portraits he has drawn of them? Would he carry us
back to the early stages of barbarism, of clanship, of the feudal system
as "a consummation devoutly to be wished?" Is he infatuated enough, or
does he so dote and drivel over his own slothful and self-willed
prejudices, as to believe that he will make a single convert to the beauty
of Legitimacy, that is, of lawless power and savage bigotry, when he
himself is obliged to apologize for the horrors he describes, and even
render his descriptions credible to the modern reader by referring to the
authentic history of these delectable times? He is indeed so besotted as
to the moral of his own story, that he has even the blindness to go out of
his way to have a fling at _flints_ and _dungs_ (the contemptible
ingredients, as he would have us believe, of a modern rabble) at the very
time when he is describing a mob of the twelfth century--a mob (one should
think) after the writer's own heart, without one particle of modern
philosophy or revolutionary politics in their composition, who were to a
man, to a hair, just what priests, and kings, and nobles _let_ them be,
and who were collected to witness (a spectacle proper to the times) the
burning of the lovely Rebecca at a stake for a sorceress, because she was
a Jewess, beautiful and innocent, and the consequent victim of insane
bigotry and unbridled profligacy. And it is at this moment (when the heart
is kindled and bursting with indignation at the revolting abuses of
self-constituted power) that Sir Walter _stops the press_ to have a sneer
at the people, and to put a spoke (as he thinks) in the wheel of upstart
innovation! This is what he "calls backing his friends"--it is thus he
administers charms and philtres to our love of Legitimacy, makes us
conceive a horror of all reform, civil, political, or religious, and would
fain put down the _Spirit of the Age_. The author of Waverley might just
as well get up and make a speech at a dinner at Edinburgh, abusing Mr.
Mac-Adam for his improvements in the roads, on the ground that they were
nearly _impassable_ in many places "sixty years since;" or object to Mr.
Peel's _Police-Bill_, by insisting that Hounslow-Heath was formerly a
scene of greater interest and terror to highwaymen and travellers, and cut
a greater figure in the Newgate Calendar than it does at present.--Oh!
Wickliff, Luther, Hampden, Sidney, Somers, mistaken Whigs, and thoughtless
Reformers in religion and politics, and all ye, whether poets or
philosophers, heroes or sages, inventors of arts or sciences, patriots,
benefactors of the human race, enlighteners and civilisers of the world,
who have (so far) reduced opinion to reason, and power to law, who are the
cause that we no longer burn witches and heretics at slow fires, that the
thumb-screws are no longer applied by ghastly, smiling judges, to extort
confession of imputed crimes from sufferers for conscience sake; that men
are no longer strung up like acorns on trees without judge or jury, or
hunted like wild beasts through thickets and glens, who have abated the
cruelty of priests, the pride of nobles, the divinity of kings in former
times: to whom we owe it, that we no longer wear round our necks the
collar of Gurth the swineherd, and of Wamba the jester; that the castles
of great lords are no longer the dens of banditti, whence they issue with
fire and sword to lay waste the land; that we no longer expire in
loathsome dungeons without knowing the cause, or have our right hands
struck off for raising them in self-defence against wanton insult; that we
can sleep without fear of being burnt in our beds, or travel without
making our wills; that no Amy Robsarts are thrown down trap-doors by
Richard Varneys with impunity; that no Red-Reiver of Westburn-Flat sets
fire to peaceful cottages; that no Claverhouse signs cold-blooded
death-warrants in sport; that we have no Tristan the Hermit, or
Petit-Andre, crawling near us, like spiders, and making our flesh creep,
and our hearts sicken within us at every movement of our lives--ye who
have produced this change in the face of nature and society, return to
earth once more, and beg pardon of Sir Walter and his patrons, who sigh at
not being able to undo all that you have done! Leaving this question,
there are two other remarks which we wished to make on the Novels. The one
was, to express our admiration of the good-nature of the mottos, in which
the author has taken occasion to remember and quote almost every living
author (whether illustrious or obscure) but himself--an indirect argument
in favour of the general opinion as to the source from which they
spring--and the other was, to hint our astonishment at the innumerable and
incessant instances of bad and slovenly English in them, more, we believe,
than in any other works now printed. We should think the writer could not
possibly read the manuscript after he has once written it, or overlook
the press.