MODERN ROMANTICISM: SCOTT
The year after the appearance of "Pride and Prejudice" there
began to be published in England a series of anonymous
historical stories to which the name of Waverley Novels came to
be affixed, the title of the first volume. It was not until the
writer had produced for more than a decade a splendid list of
fictions familiar to all lovers of literature, that his name--by
that time guessed by many and admitted to some--was publicly
announced as that of Walter Scott--a man who, before he had
printed a single romance, had won more than national importance
by a succession of narrative poems beginning with "The Lay of
the Last Minstrel."
Few careers, personal and professional, in letters, are more
stimulating and attractive than that of Scott. His life was
winsome, his work of that large and noble order that implies a
worthy personality behind it. Scott, the man, as he is portrayed
in Lockhart's Life and the ever-delightful Letters, is as
suitable an object of admiration as Scott the author of "Guy
Mannering" and "Old Mortality." And when we reflect that by the
might of his genius he set his seal on the historical romance,
that the modern romance derives from Scott, and that, moreover,
in spite of the remarkable achievements in this order of fiction
during almost a century, he remains not only its founder but its
chief ornament, his contribution to modern fiction begins to be
appreciated.
The characteristics of the Novel proper as a specific kind of
fiction have been already indicated and illustrated in this
study: we have seen that it is a picture of real life in a
setting of to-day: the romance, which is Scott's business, is
distinguished from this in its use of past time and historic
personages, its heightening of effect by the introducing of the
exceptional in scene and character, its general higher color in
the conductment of the narrative: and above all, its emphasis
upon the larger, nobler, more inspiring aspects of humanity.
This, be it understood, is the romance of modern times, not the
elder romance which was irresponsible in its picture of life,
falsely idealistic. When Sir Walter began his fiction, the trend
of the English Novel inheriting the method and purpose of
Richardson, was away from the romantic in this sense. The
analysis given has, it may be hoped, made this plain. It was by
the sheer force of his creative gift, therefore, that Scott set
the fashion for the romance in fiction: aided though he
doubtless was by the general romanticism introduced by the
greater English poets and expressive of the movement in
literature towards freedom, which followed the French
Revolution. That Scott at this time gave the fiction an impulse
not in the central flow of development is shown in the fact of
its rapid decadence after he passed away. While the romance is
thus a different thing from the Novel, modern fiction is close
woven of the two strands of realism and romance, and a
comprehensive study must have both in mind. Even authors like
Dickens, Thackeray and Eliot, who are to be regarded as stalwart
realists, could not avoid a single sally each into romance, with
"A Tale of Two Cities," "Henry Osmond" and "Romola"; and on the
other hand, romanticists like Hawthorne and Stevenson have used
the methods and manner of the realist, giving their loftiest
flights the most solid groundwork of psychologic reality. It
must always be borne in mind that there is a romantic way of
dealing with fact: that a novel of contemporary society which
implies its more exceptional possibilities and gives due regard
to the symbol behind every so-called fact, can be, in a good
sense, romantic. Surely, that is a more acceptable use of the
realistic formula which, by the exercise of an imaginative grasp
of history, makes alive and veritable for us some hitherto
unrealized person or by-gone epoch. Scott is thus a romanticist
because he gave the romantic implications of reality: and is a
novelist in that broader, better definition of the word which
admits it to be the novelist's business to portray social
humanity, past or present, by means of a unified, progressive
prose narrative. Scott, although he takes advantage of the
romancer's privilege of a free use of the historic past, the
presentation of its heroic episodes and spectacular events, is a
novelist, after all, because he deals with the recognizably
human, not with the grotesque, supernatural, impossible. He
imparts a vivid sense of the social interrelations, for the most
part in a medieval environment, but in any case in an
environment which one recognizes as controlled by human laws;
not the brain-freak of a pseudo-idealist. Scott's Novels, judged
broadly, make an impression of unity, movement and climax. To
put it tersely: he painted manners, interpreted character in an
historic setting and furnished story for story's sake. Nor was
his genius helpless without the historic prop. Certain of his
major successes are hardly historical narratives at all; the
scene of "Guy Mannering," for example, and of "The Antiquary,"
is laid in a time but little before that which was known
personally to the romancer in his young manhood.
It will be seen in this theory of realism and romance that so
far from antagonists are the story of truth and the story of
poetry, they merely stand for diverging preferences in handling
material. Nobody has stated this distinction better than
America's greatest romancer, Nathaniel Hawthorne. Having "The
House of the Seven Gables" in mind, he says:
When a writer calls his work a romance, it need hardly be
observed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude both as
to its fashion and material, which he would not have felt
himself entitled to assume, had he professed to be writing
a novel. The latter form of composition is presumed to aim
at a very minute fidelity, not only to the possible, but to
the probable and ordinary course of man's experience. The
former, while as a work of art it must rigidly subject
itself to laws and while it sins unpardonably so far as it
may swerve aside from the truth of the human heart, has
fairly a right to present that truth under circumstances to
a great extent of the author's own choosing or creation. If
he think fit, also, he may so manage his atmospherical
medium as to bring out or mellow the lights and deepen and
enrich the shadows of the picture. He will be wise, no
doubt, to make a very moderate use of the privileges here
stated, and, especially, to mingle the marvelous rather as
a slight, delicate and evanescent flavor than as any
portion of the actual substance of the dish offered to the
public. The point of view in which this tale comes under
the romantic definition lies in the attempt to connect a
by-gone time with the very present that is flitting away
from us. It is a legend, prolonging itself from an epoch
now gray in the distance, down into our own broad daylight,
and bringing along with it some of its legendary mist,
which the reader may either disregard or allow it to float
almost imperceptibly about the characters and events for
the sake of a picturesque effect. The narrative, it may be,
is woven of so humble a texture, as to require this
advantage and at the same time to render it the more
difficult of attainment.
These words may be taken as the modern announcement of Romance,
as distinguished from that of elder times.
The many romantic Novels written by Scott can be separated into
two groups, marked by a cleavage of time: the year being 1819,
the date of the publication of "Ivanhoe." In the earlier group,
containing the fiction which appeared during the five years from
1814 to 1819, we find world-welcomed masterpieces which are an
expression of the unforced first fruits of his genius: the three
series of "Tales of My Landlord," "Guy Mannering," "Rob Roy,"
"The Heart of Midlothian" and "Old Mortality," to mention the
most conspicuous. To the second division belong stories equally
well known, many of them impressive: "The Monastery,"
"Kenilworth," "Quentin Durward," and "Red Gauntlet" among them,
but as a whole marking a falling off of power as increasing
years and killing cares made what was at first hardly more than
a sportive effort, a burden under which a man, at last broken,
staggered toward the desired goal. There is no manlier, more
gallant spectacle offered in the annals of literature than this
of Walter Scott, silent partner in a publishing house and ruined
by its failure after he has set up country gentleman and
gratified his expensive taste for baronial life, as he buckles
to, and for weary years strives to pay off by the product of his
pen the obligations incurred; his executors were able to clear
his estate of debt. It was an immense drudgery (with all
allowance for its moments of creative joy) accomplished with
high spirits and a kind of French gayety. Nor, though the best
quality of the work was injured towards the end of the long
task, and Scott died too soon at sixty-one, was the born
raconteur in him choked by this grim necessity of grind. There
have been in modern fiction a few masters, and but a few, who
were natural improvisatori: conspicuous among them are Dumas the
elder and Walter Scott. Such writers pour forth from a very
spring of effortless power invention after invention, born of
the impulse of a rich imagination, a mind stored with bountiful
material for such shaping, and a nature soaked with the
humanities. They are great lovers of life, great personalities,
gifted, resourceful, unstinted in their giving, ever with
something of the boy in them, the careless prodigals of
literature. Often it seems as if they toiled not to acquire the
craft of the writer, nor do they lose time over the labor of the
file. To the end, they seem in a way like glorious amateurs.
They are at the antipodes of those careful craftsmen with whom
all is forethought, plan and revision. Scott, fired by a period,
a character or scene, commonly sat down without seeing his way
through and wrote currente calamo, letting creation take care of
its own. The description of him by a contemporary is familiar
where he was observed at a window, reeling off the manuscript
sheets of his first romance.
Since we sat down I have been watching that confounded
hand--it fascinates my eye. It never stops--page after page
is finished and thrown on the heap of manuscript, and still
it goes on unwearied--and so it will be until candles are
brought in, and God knows how long after that. It is the
same every night.
The great merits of such a nature and the method that is its
outcome should not blind us to its dangers, some of which Scott
did not escape. Schoolboys to-day are able to point out defects
in his style, glibly talking of loosely-built sentences,
redundancies, diffuseness, or what not. He seems long-winded to
the rising generation, and it may be said in their defense that
there are Novels of Scott which if cut down one-third would be
improved. Critics, too, speak of his anachronisms, his huddled
endings, the stiffness of his young gentleman heroes, his
apparent indifference to the laws of good construction; as well
as of his Tory limitations, the ponderosity of his manner and
the unmodernness of his outlook on the world along with the
simple superficiality of his psychology. All this may cheerfully
be granted, and yet the Scott lover will stoutly maintain that
the spirit and the truth are here, that the Waverley books
possess the great elements of fiction-making: not without reason
did they charm Europe as well as the English-speaking lands for
twenty years. The Scott romances will always be mentioned, with
the work of Burns, Carlyle and Stevenson, when Scotland's
contribution to English letters is under discussion; his
position is fortified as he recedes into the past, which so soon
engulfs lesser men. And it is because he was one of the world's
natural storytellers: his career is an impressive object-lesson
for those who would elevate technique above all else.
He produced romances which dealt with English history centuries
before his own day, or with periods near his time: Scotch
romances of like kind which had to do with the historic past of
his native land: romances of humbler life and less stately
entourage, the scenes of which were laid nearer, sometimes
almost within his own day. He was, in instances, notably
successful in all these kinds, but perhaps most of all in the
stories falling in the two categories last-named: which, like
"Old Mortality," have the full flavor of Scotch soil.
The nature of the Novels he was to produce became evident with
the first of them all, "Waverley." Here is a border tale which
narrates the adventures of a scion of that house among the loyal
Highlanders temporarily a rebel to the reigning English
sovereign and a recruit in the interests of the young pretender:
his fortunes, in love and war, and his eventual reinstatement in
the King's service and happiness with the woman of his choice.
While it might be too sweeping to say that there was in this
first romance (which has never ranked with his best) the whole
secret of the Scott historical story, it is true that the book
is typical, that here as in the long line of brilliantly
envisaged chronicle histories that followed, some of them far
superior to this initial attempt, are to be found the
characteristic method and charm of Sir Walter. Here, as
elsewhere, the reader is offered picturesque color, ever varied
scenes, striking situations, salient characters and a certain
nobility both of theme and manner that comes from the accustomed
representation of life in which large issues of family and state
are involved--the whole merged in a mood of fealty and love. You
constantly feel in Scott that life "means intensely and means
good." A certain amount of lovable partisanship and prejudice
goes with the view, not un-welcomely; there is also some
carelessness as to the minute details of fact. But the effect of
truth, both in character and setting, is overwhelming. Scott has
vivified English and Scotch history more than all the history
books: he saw it himself--so we see it. One of the reasons his
work rings true--whereas Mrs. Radcliffe's adventure tales seem
fictitious as well as feeble--is because it is the natural
outcome of his life: all his interest, his liking, his belief
went into the Novels. When he sat down at the mature age of
forty-three to make fiction, there was behind him the large part
of a lifetime of unconscious preparation for what he had to do:
for years he had been steeped in the folk-lore and legend of his
native country; its local history had been his hobby; he had not
only read its humbler literature but wandered widely among its
people, absorbed its language and its life, felt "the very pulse
of the machine." Hence he differed toto caelo from an
archeologist turned romancer like the German Ebers: being rather
a genial traveler who, after telling tales of his experiences by
word of mouth at the tavern hearth, sets them down upon paper
for better preservation. He had been no less student than
pedestrian in the field; lame as he was, he had footed his way
to many a tall memorial of a hoary past, and when still hardly
more than a boy, burrowed among the manuscripts of the
Advocates' Library in Edinburgh, making himself an able
antiquary at a time when most youth are idling or philandering.
Moreover, he was himself the son of a border chief and knew
minstrelsy almost at his nurse's knee: and the lilt of a ballad
was always like wine to his heart. It makes you think of Sir
Philip Sidney's splendid testimony to such an influence: "I
never heard the old song of Percy and Douglas that I found not
my heart moved more than with a trumpet."
All this could not but tell; the incidents in a book like
"Waverley" are unforced: the advance of the story closely
imitates Life in its ever-shifting succession of events: the
reader soon learns to trust the author's faculty of invention.
Plot, story-interest, is it not the backbone of romantic
fiction? And Scott, though perchance he may not conduct it so
swiftly as pleases the modern taste, may be relied on to furnish
it.
In the earlier period up to "Ivanhoe," that famous sortie into
English history, belong such masterpieces as "Guy Mannering,"
"Old Mortality," "Heart of Midlothian," "The Bride of
Lammermoor," and "Rob Roy"; a list which, had he produced
nothing else would have sufficed to place him high among the
makers of romance. It is not the intention to analyze these
great books one by one--a task more fit for a volume than a
chapter; but to bring out those qualities of his work which are
responsible for his place in fiction and influence in the Novel
of the nineteenth century.
No story of this group--nor of his career as a writer--has won
more plaudits than "The Heart of Midlothian." Indeed, were the
reader forced to the unpleasant necessity of choosing out of the
thirty stories which Scott left the world the one most deserving
of the prize, possibly the choice would fall on that superb
portrayal of Scotch life--although other fine Novels of the
quintet named would have their loyal friends. To study the
peerlessly pathetic tale of Effie and Jeanie Deans is to see
Scott at his representative best and note the headmarks of his
genius: it is safe to say that he who finds nothing in it can
never care for its author.
The first thing to notice in this novel of the ancient Edinburgh
Tolbooth, this romance of faithful sisterhood, is its essential
Scotch fiber. The fact affects the whole work. It becomes
thereby simpler, homelier, more vernacular: it is a story that
is a native emanation. The groundwork of plot too is simple,
vital: and moreover, founded on a true incident. Effie, the
younger of two sisters, is betrayed; concerning her betrayer
there is mystery: she is supposed to commit child-murder to hide
her shame: a crime then punishable by death. The story deals
with her trial, condemnation and final pardon and happy marriage
with her lover through the noble mediation of Jeanie, her elder
sister.
In the presentation of an earlier period in Scotland, the
opening of the eighteenth century, when all punitive measures
were primitive and the lawless social elements seethed with
restless discontent, Scott had a fine chance: and at the very
opening, in describing the violent putting to death of Captain
Porteous, he skilfully prepares the way for the general picture
to be given. Then, as the story progresses, to the supreme
sacrificial effort of Jeanie in behalf of her erring sister's
life, gradually, stroke upon stroke, the period with its
religious schisms, its political passions and strong family
ties, is so illuminated that while the interest is centered upon
the Deans and their homely yet tragic history, Scotch life in an
earlier century is envisaged broadly, truthfully, in a way never
to grow pale in memory. Cameraman or King's man, God-fearing
peasant, lawless ruffian or Tory gentleman, the characters are
so marshaled that without sides being taken by the writer, one
feels the complexity of the period: and its uncivil wildness is
dramatically conveyed as a central fact in the Tolbooth with its
grim concomitants of gallows and gaping crowd of sightseers and
malcontents.
Scott's feeling for dramatic situation is illustrated in several
scenes that stand out in high relief after a hundred details
have been forgotten: one such is the trial scene in which Effie
implores her sister to save her by a lie, and Jeanie in agony
refuses; the whole management of it is impressively pictorial.
Another is that where Jeanie, on the road to London, is detained
by the little band of gypsy-thieves and passes the night with
Madge Wildfire in the barn: it is a scene Scott much relishes
and makes his reader enjoy. And yet another, and greater, is
that meeting with Queen Caroline and Lady Suffolk when the
humble Scotch girl is conducted by the Duke of Argyll to the
country house and in the garden beseeches pardon for her sister
Effie. It is intensely picturesque, real with many homely
touches which add to the truth without cheapening the effect of
royalty. The gradual working out of the excellent plot of this
romance to a conclusion pleasing to the reader is a favorable
specimen of this romancer's method in story-telling. There is
disproportion in the movement: it is slow in the first part,
drawing together in texture and gaining in speed during its
closing portion. Scott does not hesitate here, as so often, to
interrupt the story in order to interpolate historical
information, instead of interweaving it atmospherically with the
tale itself. When Jeanie is to have her interview with the Duke
of Argyll, certain preliminary pages must be devoted to a sketch
of his career. A master of plot and construction to-day would
have made the same story, so telling in motive, so vibrant with
human interest, more effective, so far as its conductment is
concerned. Scott in his fiction felt it as part of his duty to
furnish chronicle-history, very much as Shakspere seems to have
done in his so-called chronicle-history plays; whereas at
present the skilled artist feels no such responsibility. It may
be questioned if the book's famous scenes--the attempted
breaking into the Tolbooth, or the visit of Jeanie to the Queen--would
not have gained greatly from a dramatic point of view had
they been more condensed; they are badly languaged, looking to
this result, not swift enough for the best effects of drama,
whereas conception and framework are highly dramatic. In a word,
if more carefully written, fuller justice would have been done
the superb theme.
The characters that crowd the novel (as, in truth, they teem
throughout the great romances) testify to his range and grasp:
the Dean family, naturally, in the center. The pious, sturdy
Cameronian father and the two clearly contrasted sisters:
Butler, the clergyman lover; the saddle-maker, Saddletree, for
an amusing, long-winded bore; the quaint Laird Dumbledikes; the
soldiers of fortune, George Wilson and his mate; that other
soldier, Porteous; the gang of evildoers with Madge in the van--a
wonderful creation, she, only surpassed by the better known
Meg--the high personages clustered about the Queen: loquacious
Mrs. Glass, the Dean's kinswoman--one has to go back to Chaucer
or Shakspere for a companion picture so firmly painted in and
composed on such a generous scale.
Contention arises in a discussion of a mortal so good as Jeanie:
it would hardly be in the artistic temper of our time to draw a
peasant girl so well-nigh superhuman in her traits; Balzac's
"Eugenie Grandet" (the book appeared only fifteen years later),
is much nearer our time in its conception of the possibilities
of human nature: Eugenie does not strain credence, while
Jeanie's pious tone at times seems out of character, if not out
of humanity. The striking contrast with Effie is in a way to her
advantage: the weaker damsel appears more natural, more like
flesh and blood. But the final scene when, after fleeing with
her high-born lover, she returns to her simple sister as a wife
in a higher grade of society and the sister agrees that their
ways henceforth must be apart--that scene for truth and power is
one of the master-strokes. The reader finds that Jeanie Deans
somehow grows steadily in his belief and affection: quietly but
surely, a sense of her comeliness, her truthful love, her quaint
touch of Scotch canniness, her daughterly duteousness and her
stanch principle intensifies until it is a pang to bid her
farewell, and the mind harks back to her with a fond
recollection. Take her for all in all, Jeanie Deans ranks high
in Scott's female portraiture: with Meg Merillies in her own
station, and with Lucy Ashton and Di Vernon among those of
higher social place. In her class she is perhaps unparalleled in
all his fiction. The whole treatment of Effie's irregular love
is a fine example of Scott's kindly tolerance (tempered to a
certain extent by the social convention of his time) in dealing
with the sins of human beings. He is plainly glad to leave Effie
an honestly married woman with the right to look forward to
happy, useful years. The story breeds generous thoughts on the
theme of young womanhood: it handled the problem neither from
the superior altitude of the conventional moralist nor the cold
aloofness of the latter-day realist--Flaubert's attitude in
"Madame Bovary."
"A big, imperfect, noble Novel," the thoughtful reader concludes
as he closes it, and thinking back to an earlier impression,
finds that time has not loosened its hold.
And to repeat the previous statement: what is true of this is
true of all Scott's romances. The theme varies, the setting with
its wealth of local color may change, the period or party differ
with the demands of fact. Scotch and English history are widely
invoked: now it is the time of the Georges, now of the Stuarts,
now Elizabethan, again back to the Crusades. Scott, in fact,
ranges from Rufus the Red to the year 1800, and many are the
complications he considers within that ample sweep. It would be
untrue to say that his plots imitate each other or lack in
invention: we have seen that invention is one of his virtues.
Nevertheless, the motives are few when disencumbered of their
stately historical trappings: hunger, ambition, love, hate,
patriotism, religion, the primary passions and bosom interests
of mankind are those he depicts, because they are universal. It
is his gift for giving them a particular dress in romance after
romance which makes the result so often satisfactory, even
splendid. Yet, despite the range of time and grasp of Life's
essentials, there is in Scott's interpretation of humanity a
certain lack which one feels in comparing him with the finest
modern masters: with a Meredith, a Turgeneff or a Balzac. It is
a difference not only of viewpoint but of synthetic
comprehension and philosophic penetration. It means that he
mirrored a day less complex, less subtle and thoughtful. This
may be dwelt upon and illustrated a little in some further
considerations on his main qualities.
Scott, like the earlier novelists in general, was content to
depict character from without rather than from within: to
display it through act and scene instead of by the probing
analysis so characteristically modern. This meant inevitable
limitations in dealing with an historical character or time. A
high-church Tory himself, a frank Jacobite in his leanings--Taine
declared he had a feudal mind--he naturally so composed a
picture as to reflect this predilection, making effects of
picturesqueness accordingly. The idea given of Mary Queen of
Scots from "The Abbot" is one example of what is meant; that of
Prince Charley in "Waverley" is another. In a sense, however,
the stories are all the better for this obvious bias. Where a
masculine imagination moved by warm affection seizes on an
historic figure the result is sure to be vivid, at least; and
let it be repeated that Scott has in this way re-created history
for the many. He shows a sound artistic instinct in his handling
of historic personages relative to those imaginary: rarely
letting them occupy the center of interest, but giving that
place to the creatures of his fancy, thereby avoiding the
hampering restriction of a too close following of fact. The
manipulation of Richard Coeur de Lion in "Ivanhoe" is
instructive with this in mind.
While the lights and shadows of human life are duly blended in
his romances, Scott had a preference for the delineation of the
gentle, the grand (or grandiose), the noble and the beautiful:
loving the medieval, desiring to reproduce the age of chivalry,
he was naturally aristocratic in taste, as in intellect, though
democratic by the dictates of a thoroughly good heart. He liked
a pleasant ending--or, at least, believed in mitigating tragedy
by a checker of sunlight at the close. He had little use for the
degenerate types of mankind: certainly none for degeneracy for
its own sake, or because of a kind of scientific interest in its
workings. Nor did he conceive of the mission of fiction as being
primarily instructional: nor set too high a value on a novel as
a lesson in life--although at times (read the moral tag to "The
Heart of Midlothian") he speaks in quite the preacher's tone of
the improvement to be got from the teaching of the tale. Critics
to-day are, I think, inclined to place undue emphasis upon what
they regard as Scott's failure to take the moral obligations of
fiction seriously: they confuse his preaching and his practice.
Whatever he declared in his letters or Journal, the novels
themselves, read in the light of current methods, certainly
leave an old-fashioned taste on the palate, because of their
moralizings and avowments of didactic purpose. The advantages
and disadvantages of this general attitude can be easily
understood: the loss in philosophic grasp is made up in
healthiness of tone and pleasantness of appeal. One recognizes
such an author as, above all, human and hearty. The reserves and
delicacies of Anglo-Saxon fiction are here, of course, in full
force: and a doctored view of the Middle Ages is the result, as
it is in Tennyson's "Idylls of the King." A sufficient answer is
that it is not Scott's business to set us right as to
medievalism, but rather to use it for the imaginative purposes
of pleasure. The frank intrusion of the author himself into the
body of the page o in the way of footnotes is also disturbing,
judged by our later standards: but was carried on with much
charm by Thackeray in the mid-century, to reappear at its end in
the pages of Du Maurier.
In the more technical qualifications of the story-maker's art,
Scott compensated in the more masculine virtues for what he
lacked in the feminine. Possessing less of finesse, subtlety and
painstaking than some who were to come, he excelled in sweep,
movement and variety, as well as in a kind of largeness of
effect: "the big bow-wow business," to use his own humorously
descriptive phrase when he was comparing himself with Jane
Austen, to his own disadvantage. And it is these very qualities
that endear him to the general and keep his memories green;
making "Ivanhoe" and "Kenilworth" still useful for school
texts--unhappy fate! Still, this means that he always had a story to
tell and told it with the flow and fervor and the instinctive
coherence of the story-teller born, not made.
When the fortunes of his fictive folk were settled, this
novelist, always more interested in characters than in the plot
which must conduct them, often loses interest and his books end
more or less lamely, or with obvious conventionality. Anything
to close it up, you feel. But of action and incident, scenes
that live and situations with stage value, one of Scott's
typical fictions has enough to furnish the stock in trade for
life of many later-day romanticists who feebly follow in his
wake. He has a special skill in connecting the comparatively
small private involvement, which is the kernel of a story, with
important public matters, so that they seem part of the larger
movements or historic occurrences of the world. Dignity and body
are gained for the tale thereby.
In the all-important matter of characterization, Scott yields
the palm to very few modern masters. Merely to think of the
range, variety and actuality of his creations is to feel the
blood move quicker. From figures of historic and regal
importance--Richard, Elizabeth, Mary--to the pure coinage of
imagination--Dandy Dinmont, Dugald Dalgetty, Dominie Sampson,
Rebecca, Lucy, Di Vernon and Jeanie--how the names begin to
throng and what a motley yet welcome company is assembled in the
assizes where this romancer sits to mete out fate to those
within the wide bailiwick of his imagination! This central gift
he possessed with the princes of story-making. It is also
probable that of the imaginative writers of English speech,
nobody but Shakspere and Dickens--and Dickens alone among fellow
fiction-makers--has enriched the workaday world with so many
people, men and women, whose speech, doings and fates are
familiar and matter for common reference. And this is the gift
of gifts. It is sometimes said that Scott's heroes and heroines
(especially, perhaps, the former) are lay figures, not
convincing, vital creations. There is a touch of truth in it.
His striking and successful figures are not walking gentlemen
and leading ladies. When, for example, you recall "Guy
Mannering," you do not think of the young gentleman of that
name, but of Meg Merillies as she stands in the night in high
relief on a bank, weather-beaten of face and wild of dress,
hurling her anathema: "Ride your ways, Ellangowan!" In
characters rather of humble pathos like Jeanie Deans or of
eccentric humor like Dominie Sampson, Scott is at his best. He
confessed to mis-liking his heroes and only warming up to full
creative activity over his more unconventional types: border
chiefs, buccaneers, freebooters and smugglers. "My rogue always,
in spite of me, turns out my hero," is his whimsical complaint.
But this does not apply in full force to his women. Di Vernon--who
does not recall that scene where from horseback in the
moonlight she bends to her lover, parting from him with the
words: "Farewell, Frank, forever! There is a gulf between us--a
gulf of absolute perdition. Where we go, you must not follow;
what we do, you must not share in--farewell, be happy!" That is
the very accent of Romance, in its true and proper setting: not
to be staled by time nor custom.
Nor will it do to claim that he succeeds with his Deans and
fails with women of regal type: his Marys and Elizabeth Tudors.
In such portrayals it seems to me he is pre-eminently fine: one
cannot understand the critics who see in such creations mere
stock figures supplied by history not breathed upon with the
breath of life. Scott had a definite talent for the stage-setting
of royalty: that is one of the reasons for the
popularity of "Kenilworth." It is, however, a true
discrimination which finds more of life and variety in Scott's
principal women than in his men of like position. But his Rob
Roys, Hatteraicks and Dalgettys justify all praise and help to
explain that title of Wizard of the North which he won and wore.
In nothing is Scott stronger than in his environments, his
devices for atmosphere. This he largely secures by means of
description and with his wealth of material, does not hesitate
to take his time in building up his effects. Perhaps the most
common criticism of him heard to-day refers to his slow
movement. Superabundance of matter is accompanied by prolixity
of style, with a result of breeding impatience in the reader,
particularly the young. Boys and girls at present do not offer
Scott the unreserved affection once his own, because he now
seems an author upon whom to exercise the gentle art of
skipping. Enough has been said as to Scott's lack of modern
economy of means. It is not necessary to declare that this
juvenile reluctance to his leisurely manner stands for total
depravity. The young reader of the present time (to say nothing
of the reader more mature) is trained to swifter methods, and
demands them. At the same time, it needs to be asserted that
much of the impressiveness of Scott would be lost were his
method and manner other than they are: nor will it do harm to
remind ourselves that we all are in danger of losing our power
of sustained and consecutive attention in relation to
literature, because of the scrap-book tendency of so much modern
reading. On the center-table, cheap magazines; on the stage,
vaudeville--these are habits that sap the ability for slow,
ruminative pleasure in the arts. Luckily, they are not the only
modern manifestation, else were we in a parlous state, indeed!
The trouble with Scott, then, may be resolved in part into a
trouble with the modern folk who read him.
When one undertakes the thankless task of analyzing coldly and
critically the style of Scott, the faults are plain enough. He
constantly uses two adjectives or three in parallel construction
where one would do the work better. The construction of his
sentences loses largely the pleasing variation of a richly
articulated system by careless punctuation and a tendency to
make parallel clauses where subordinate relations should be
expressed. The unnecessary copula stars his pages. Although his
manner in narration rises with his subject and he may be justly
called a picturesque and forceful writer, he is seldom a
distinguished one. One does not turn to him for the inevitable
word or phrase, or for those that startle by reason of felicity
and fitness. These strictures apply to his descriptive and
narrative parts, not to the dialogue: for there, albeit sins of
diffuseness and verbosity are to be noted--and these are
modified by the genial humanity they embody--he is one of the
great masters. His use of the Scotch dialect adds indefinitely
to his attraction and native smack: racy humor, sly wit, canny
logic, heartful sympathy--all are conveyed by the folk medium.
All subsequent users of the people-speech pay toll to Walter
Scott. Small courtesy should be extended to those who complain
that these idioms make hard reading. Never does Scott give us
dialect for its own sake, but always for the sake of a closer
revelation of the human heart--dialect's one justification.
At its worst, Scott's style may fairly be called ponderous,
loose, monotonous: at its finest, the adequate instrument of a
natural story-teller who is most at home when, emerging from his
longueur, he writes of grand things in the grand manner.
Thus, Sir Walter Scott defined the Romance for modern fiction,
gave it the authority of his genius and extended the gamut of
the Novel by showing that the method of the realist, the
awakening of interest in the actualities of familiar character
and life, could be more broadly applied. He opposed the realist
in no true sense: but indicated how, without a lapse of art or
return to outworn machinery, justice might yet be done to the
more stirring, large, heroic aspects of the world of men: a
world which exists and clamors to be expressed: a world which
readers of healthy taste are perennially interested in, nay,
sooner or later, demand to be shown. His fiction, whether we
award it the somewhat grudging recognition of Carlyle or with
Ruskin regard its maker as the one great novelist of English
race, must be deemed a precious legacy, one of literature's most
honorable ornaments--especially desirable in a day so apparently
plain and utilitarian as our own, eschewing ornament and
perchance for that reason needing it all the more.