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.
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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.
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
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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
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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.
“waverley”
in edinburgh, on his way to abbotsford, scott found constable about to publish the third edition
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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
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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.
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 fitz
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gerald’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 mor
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tal 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.
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 let
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ters), 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.
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
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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
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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
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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.
the novels
but it is curious that hogg represents scott as
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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
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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.
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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
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—
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.”
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 mont
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rose,” 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
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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.
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
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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.
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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,
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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
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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.
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 man
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ner 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
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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.
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,
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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
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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
the novels
the chantrey bust of sir walter scott, 1820.
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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.
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