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The general characteristics, the merits and defects of theWaverleynovels may be reviewed, before we approach the history of each example in its turn. In an age when an acquaintance with FitzGerald’s Rubáiyàt of Omar Kháyyám, an exhaustive ignorance of all literature of the past, and an especial contempt for Scott, whom FitzGerald so intensely admired, are the equipment of many critics, we must be very cautious in praising theWaverleynovels. 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, exceptTom 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 findle mot propre, usually the least natural word for any mortal to use in the circumstances. But once Scottdidhunt forle 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?” “Yewhummledthe 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.
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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’sJohnson, and Walpole’sLetters), in which no men and women of mould ever did talk, even in the eighteenth century. But Catherine Glover, inThe 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 theWaverleynovels, combined with descriptive passages that, to some, are a weariness. These are frank confessions from a zealot who has read most of theWaverleynovels 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.
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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 bythe 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 toThe Fortunes of Nigel. In these pages Captain Clutterbuck describes an interview with “The Eidolon, or representative vision of The Author ofWaverley.” Scott, in fact, anticipates the modern “interview,” but he interviews himself, and does the business better than the suave modern reporter. After confessing thatThe 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 theynow 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 theOdyssey, on which Wolf, the great sceptic as to the unity of theIliad, bestowed the praise of masterly composition which the Captain gives toTom Jones. But several modern German critics and Father Browne of the Society of Jesus, assure us that the plot of theOdysseyis 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 Jonesis the stupidest book in the English language.” Yet, if theOdysseytriumphed over the Zoili of three thousand years, whileTom Joneswas 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 itis 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.
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But it is curious that Hogg represents Scott ascriticisinghistales 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 youcando 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 thensee 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.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.”
“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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“Captain.—Resolution and determined forbearance might remedy that evil.
“Author.—Alas! my dear sir, you do not know the force of paternal affection. When I light on such a character as Bailie Jarvie, or Dalgetty, my imagination brightens, and my conception becomes clearer at every step which I take in his company, although it leads me many a weary mile away from the regular road, and forces me to leap hedge and ditch to get back into the route again. If I resist the temptation, as you advise me, my thoughts become prosy, flat, and dull; I write painfully to myself, and under a consciousness of flagging which makes me flag still more; the sunshine with which fancy had invested the incidents, departs from them, and leaves every thing dull and gloomy. I am no more the same author I was in my better mood, than the dog in a wheel, condemned to go round and round for hours, is like the same dog merrily chasing his own tail, and gambolling in all the frolic of unrestrained freedom. In short, sir, on such occasions, I think I am bewitched.”
Scott next professes that he cannot write plays, as the Captain urges him to do, if he would. The applauded scraps of “Old Play” which head many of his chapters, are borrowed from manuscript dramas about which he tells a fable. As to the charge of making money—
O, if it were a mean thing,The Gentles would not use it;And if it were ungodly,The clergy would refuse it.
O, if it were a mean thing,The Gentles would not use it;And if it were ungodly,The clergy would refuse it.
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.”
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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 orscenarioof hisKidnapped, was very unlike the actual romance as it stands. The preeminent merit of Scott was that of a creator of characters. These personages became living, and, because they were living, spontaneous and uncontrollable. What began as a “Legend of Montrose,” left the great Marquis in the background, and became the Odyssey of Thackeray’s favourite, Dugald Dalgetty, “of Drumthwacket that should be,” that inimitable and immortal man of the sword. So it is throughout theWaverleynovels. The characterswill“gang their ain gait.” They come across the author’s fancy, as Mrs. Gamp, who had no part in the original plan ofMartin Chuzzlewit, came across the fancy of Dickens, and they work their will on plot and author. In fact, the almost mechanical merit of construction orcharpentageis 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, ifPendennis“has an outline, it is a demned outline.” OfEsmondthe motto may hold good—
Servetur ad imumQualis ab incepto processerit, et sibi constet.
Servetur ad imumQualis ab incepto processerit, et sibi constet.
Servetur ad imumQualis 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 todelete 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 littlechef d’oeuvre, “Wandering Willie’s Tale” inRedgauntlet. We are thus obliged to confess that he was on occasion culpably indolent. Mr. Stevenson cites a romantic passage ofGuy Manneringin 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.
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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 atnotes 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 ofMary 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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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 ajeune premier? He must be brave, modest, handsome, good, and not too clever—an ideal son-in-law, and he must be a true lover. Scott pronounced his earliest hero, Edward Waverley, “a sneaking piece of imbecility.... I am a bad hand at depicting a hero properly so-called.” True, but what kind of hero is Martin Chuzzlewit, or Clive Newcome,and is there any hero at all inVanity Fair? Tom Jones and Captain Booth take leading parts, but are nothing less than heroic. They arecharacters, 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 soberjuste 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 ofGuy 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.Ivanhoewould have beenmore 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, howcouldyou 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.
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The heroines, though it seems a paradox to say so, are really more successful than the heroes. InThe Heart of Midlothianthere 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 inNorthanger Abbey. Though rather stilted, in the manner of the period, Rebecca is a noble creature. Catherine Seyton, ofThe 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 worksuch a piece of “realism” stands alone, like the story of Phoenix in Homer’s work (in the Ninth Book of theIliad). 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.
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I am unable to think the worse of him because he imposed on himself limitations which Byron triumphantly broke through, though Scott’s limits now militate against a high appreciation of his work by the admirers of M. Guy de Maupassant and M. Catulle Mendès. “A man canna do what he canna do,” and Scott could not have treated the favourite themes of these masters, if he would. He had funds enough to draw upon in human life and character, without hunting for personages and situations in dark malodorous corners. The glory of his work is, of course, not merely his wealth of incident, and his natural gift of story telling, but his crowd of characters, from his princes, such as James VI, an immortal picture, Louis XI, Elizabeth, Mary, Charles II in flight or in such prosperity as he loved, to his Highland chiefs, his ploughmen, his lairds, Bucklaw and old Redgauntlet, the persecutor; his copper captains in Alsatia,his baillies, his Covenanting preachers, his Claverhouse, his serving men, his Andrew Fairservice, his yeomen, his Dandie Dinmont, with the Dinmont family and terriers, his wild women, Meg Merrilees, and Madge Wildfire; his smugglers, his lawyers, from Pleydell to the elder Fairford, and even his bores, who, like Miss Austen’s bores, are certainly too much with us, who can number the throng of such characters, all living and delightful? The novels arevécus: 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 neweditions of all sorts, and at various prices, theWaverleynovels 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 asbeingsin 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
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The Chantrey Bust of Sir Walter Scott, 1820.
The Chantrey Bust of Sir Walter Scott, 1820.
The Chantrey Bust of Sir Walter Scott, 1820.
stoical heart of Saunders Mucklebackit; of the fallen Bradwardine, happy in unsullied honour; never near the heart of the maddened Peter Peebles; never near the flawless Christian heart of Bessie M’Clure; or the heart of dauntless remorse of Nancy Ewart; or the heart of sacrificed love in Diana Vernon; or the stout heart of Dalgetty in the dungeon of Inveraray; or the secret soul of Mary Stuart, revealed when she is reminded of Bastian’s bridal mask, and the deed of Kirk o’ Field?Quid plura, Thomas Carlyle wrote splenetic nonsense: “he was very capable of having it happen to him.”
“WAVERLEY”
“Waverley”is not, perhaps, the novel with which one would recommend a person anxious to find out whether or not Sir Walter can still be read, to begin his studies. The six chapters written in 1805 are prolix and unnecessary. A modern narrator would commence with Chapter VIII. “It was about noon when Captain Waverley entered the straggling village or rather hamlet of Tully-Veolan,” and would find easy means of enlightening us as to who Captain Waverley was. One sentence in the long preliminary account of the hero refers to Scott himself. “He would exercise for hours that internal sorcery, by which past or imaginary scenes are presented, in action as it were, to the eyes of the muser.” Like Dickens and Thackeray, Scott was a natural “visualizer,” seeing in his mind’s eye the aspects of his characters, and hearing their voices. Perhaps there is no poetic genius without this gift, which Mr. Galton has found almost absent among, and unknown to menof science, though the presence of the power of visualization by no means implies that it is accompanied by genius. Scott’s friends did not conceal from him that they were little interested in his tale, before they entered the village and château of Tully-Veolan. From that point all was new to most of them, while no romance of the Forty-Five, a theme now so hackneyed, or of Highland life and manners at the date of Sixty Years Since had ever been offered to the world. Indeed the death of the last of the male line of Stuart was almost contemporary with the year in which Scott began his romance, and while there remained a shadowy King over the water, a Jacobite romance might seem a thing in doubtful taste. We cannot, after a century, feel the absolute freshness of impression which the novel made on contemporary readers.
“GUY MANNERING”
We know, in one way or another, all that can be said about Highland and Lowland life in 1745, and there are passages ofWaverleyin which we are almost reminded of Becker’sCharicles, and other instructive pictures of classical manners. Scott, of course, was accused of “slandering the Highlanders,” because he described the cattle stealings which, as contemporaries assert, were regularly organized by the furtive genius of Macdonnell of Barisdale, with intermediaries among the broken clan of the Macgregors, and the less reputable ofthe dwellers in Rannoch. The relations of Cluny Macpherson with the independent Highland companies had been not unlike those of Fergus MacIvor, a chief quite as much impelled by personal ambition, and the promise of a Jacobite earldom (Lovat was to be a duke, Glengarry an earl), as by any disinterested devotion to the White Rose. There were chiefs like Lochiel, as there were Lowlanders like the Oliphants of Gask, who fought purely for the sake of honour and devotion. The mass of the Jacobite clansmen were notoriously as loyal as steel to their Prince. But there are black sheep in every flock. “There is something,” says Scott, “in the severe judgment passed on my countrymen, that if they do not prefer Scotland to truth, they will always prefer it to inquiry.” Scott preferred inquiry, and gave us the results in Callum Beg and in the darker side of the character of Fergus MacIvor, which irritated some of the fiery Celts. Fergus redeems himself by the courage of his end, but the favourite characters of the novel are, as usual, the subordinates, that gallant, prosy, honourable pedant, the Baron Bradwardine, Davy Gellatley with his songs, Balmawhapple, Baillie Macwheeble, Evan Dhu Maccombich, the Gifted Gilfillan, the Prince himself, and how many others! The pictures of Holyrood and the Prince’s Court, of the rout of Prestonpans, and the march intoEngland, are as brilliant as they then were unhackneyed, and thoughWaverleyis not the best of the series of novels, it made an excellent beginning.
Meanwhile stern necessity urged Scott to that grinding of verses,invita Minerva, to which he said that “the peine forte et dureis nothing in comparison,” and his mood was “devilish repulsive” to the task of working onThe Lord of the Isles. So he wrote the last three cantos in five weeks, and set out for Abbotsford to “refresh the machine” by writingGuy Manneringin six! He had only gleaned the story of the Astrologer on November 7, from Mr. Train, and between that date and some time in February 1815, he had finished bothThe Lord of the Islesand the novel ofThe Astrologer. He announced to Mr. Morritt at once that “The Lord of the Islescloses my poetic labours upon an extended scale,” this before the book proved not quite satisfactory to the public. He was wont to say that he abandoned poetry “on an extended scale” because Byron “beat” him, but he was now forty-five, was confessedly weary of “grinding verses,” and had found an easier, a more congenial, and a more lucrative form of work, one which suited his genius better, and was of a more permanent appeal than the romance in verse. Since his time, setting apart the temporary vogue of Byron’sGiaoursandLaras, rhymed romances on Oriental themes, the world has steadily declined to read long narrative poems. Mr. William Morris alone, for a while, won some readers back to his peculiar form of this genre. InThe Lord of the Isleswe remember little but the Battle of Bannockburn, which has all the fiery energy of Scott in his Homeric mood, and makes a fit pendant to his Flodden Field. Though Scott, before he learned from Ballantyne that the book was a comparative failure, had meant to abandon rhymed romances, he was a little damped by knowledge of the fact, and, pointing toThe Giaour, which Byron had sent to him, he remarked, “James, Byron hits the mark where I don’t even pretend to fledge my arrow.” Says Lockhart, “he always appeared to me quite blind to the fact that inThe Giaour, inThe Bride of Abydos, inParisina, and indeed in all his early serious narratives, Byron owed at least half his success to clever though perhaps unconscious imitation of, Scott.” He also owed much to his Oriental themes, to the vogue of his beauty and life of adventure, and to his fluttering of the dovecotes of propriety. Byron spoke as generously of Scott as Scott did of Byron: neither felt for the other the indifference of Wordsworth nor the contempt of Coleridge. In contact with Scott all that is finest in Byron’s character glows like the diamond in the presence of radium.
“GUY MANNERING”
Guy Manneringmade up for Scott’s disappointment. His advisers, from the first, deemed it “more interesting” thanWaverley, perhaps because it dealt with their own times and manners, for the topic is not in itself nearly so rich in romance. The strength of the book is in the characters, the donnert good humoured laird, that customary villain, the attorney, the smugglers, the gipsies, Meg Merrilees, honest Dandie Dinmont, and the lawyers whether at high jinks or in more sober mood, while the scene of the old maid’s funeral and the reading of her will cannot be surpassed. Dominie Sampson was a great favourite, though a sample of “Scott’s bores,” and too apt to return like a refrain, with his peculiarities, in the manner of some of Dickens’s characters.
Scott went up to London with his laurels fresh, and met Byron; the pair, in Homeric fashion, exchanged gifts, Scott offering a gold-hilted Oriental dagger, and Byron a silver vase, containing the dust of Athenian men of old. Scott remarked in Byron a trait of Rousseau’s, starts of suspicion, when he seemed to pause and consider whether there had not been a secret, and perhaps offensive, meaning in something casually said to him. At times he was “almost gloomy,” and, in short, he must have been “gey ill to live with.” But Scott quietly allowed the black dog to leave his shoulder,and consoled himself with the less perilous gaieties of the Prince Regent. Scott always denied the story that the Prince asked him point blank whether he was the author ofWaverley. The Duke of York, however, said “my brother went rather too near the wind aboutWaverley, but nobody could have turned the thing more prettily than Walter Scott did.” In fact his reply sailed as near the wind as the insinuation of the Prince.
The news of Waterloo, the triumph of his nation, allured Scott to the scene of the battle. He left London for the Continent a month after the fight. His expenses and more were paid byPaul’s Letters to his Kinsfolk, journal letters written to the Abbotsford circle. These contain so perfect a picture of the man at this juncture that, if people had time to read Lockhart’sLifeof him, the book might well be added to it as a supplementary volume of autobiography. Scott’s enthusiasm for the national victory did not swallow up his observation of every trait of foreign life, or his excitement over “the tiniest relics of feudal antiquity.” He saw the battlefield under the guidance of Costar, the peasant who, according to his own account, accompanied Napoleon, a point on which there were sceptics.
WATERLOO
Already the British myth of the battle was current, and is reported by Scott in a letter to the Dukeof Buccleuch. The legend was that the Prussian fire was not heard, nor did the Prussian columns appear from within the woods, till the moment when a part of the French Imperial Guard made the last attack on our position. Now the Prussians really made themselves felt on the French right about four or half-past four o’clock, and three hours were occupied by them in furious fighting at Planchenoit, while the French captured La Haye Sainte on our front; and the Prussians, in reinforcements constantly coming up, were doing the business on the French right, and beginning to menace the French rear, when the last charge by a portion of their Guard was made and failed. Scott understands all this in hisLife of Napoleon, though even there he does not quite make clear the length and severity of the Prussian task. But even British officers engaged at Waterloo seem to have gravely misconceived the magnitude of Blücher’s share in the victory.
“France is not, and cannot be crushed,” said Scott, and, in 1815, he foresaw the Orleanist conspiracy of fifteen years, and the fall of the Bourbons. On meeting the Duke of Wellington he felt those emotions of awe which he attributes to Roland Graeme in the presence of the Regent Moray, “the eminent soldier and statesman, the wielder of a nation’s power, and the leader of itsarmies.” “To have done things worthy to be written was, in his eyes, a dignity to which no man had made any approach, who had only written things worthy to be read.” The gallant Wolfe expressed the converse opinion, when he recited Gray’sElegyin the boat, on the way to the capture of Quebec, and to his death, Scott’s belief in doing as far superior to writing, embraced the achievements of peace as well as of war. He “betrayed painful uneasiness when his works were alluded to as reflecting honour on the age that had produced Watt’s improvement of the steam engine, and the safety lamp of Sir Humphry Davy.” In brief, Scott was a born man of action, and only the accident of his lameness prevented him from being the mate of Hill and Picton in the field, and perhaps the rival of Napier as the historian of warfare. That gift of seeing with the mind’s eye, which was noted in Wellington as well as in Napoleon, would have served his purposes as a general.
He came home, with presents for all the people on his estate, and with that poem ofWaterloowhich was the subject of amusing banter,
None, by sabre or by shot,Fell half so flat as Walter Scott.
None, by sabre or by shot,Fell half so flat as Walter Scott.
None, by sabre or by shot,Fell half so flat as Walter Scott.
“THE ANTIQUARY”
The emendations made by John Ballantyne on the proof sheets of this effort show considerable intelligence and taste, and in several cases were approved of and accepted by the author, though he once said that he was “the Black Brunswicker of literature who neither took nor gave criticism.” In fact he took rather too much, in some cases, as inSt. Ronan’s Well, altered and spoiled to please the prudery of James Ballantyne. The profits of the first edition ofWaterloowent to the fund for the widows and orphans of soldiers. By December 1815,Paul’s Letters to his Kinsfolkwere published, and the “sweet heathen of Monkbarns,”The Antiquary, was in hand.
In this novel Scott wrote of his own day, and with one or two old friends, was himself the composite model forThe Antiquary. As usual, the reader cares not much for Lovel and his lady, Miss Wardour, but the humour of the portraits of the sturdy Whig antiquary, his sense, and his foibles, and of his rival and friend the foolish Tory, Sir Arthur Wardour, are perennially delightful. Perhaps only archæological amateurs can thoroughly appreciate the learning of which Monkbarns is so profuse, and this, no doubt, is a drawback to the popularity of the tale. The charlatan, Dousterswivel, is in a rather forced vein of humour, but the figures of Edie Ochiltree, of the gossips in the village post-office, of the barber, and all the country folk, with the incident of the escape from the risingtide, and the romance of Elspeth of the Burnfoot and the stoicism of Mucklebackit, are, in their various ways, examples of Scott at his very best, while the ballad of the Red Harlaw stands absolutely alone, far above all modern attempts to imitate ancient popularVolkslieder.
Now haud your tongue, baith wife and carle,And listen, great and sma’,And I will sing of Glenallan’s EarlThat fought on the red Harlaw.The cronach’s cried on Bennachie,And doun the Don and a’,And hieland and lawland may mournfu’ beFor the sair field of Harlaw.They saddled a hundred milk-white steeds,They hae bridled a hundred black,With a chafron of steel on each horse’s head,And a good knight upon his back.They hadna ridden a mile, a mile,A mile, but barely ten,When Donald came branking down the braeWi’ twenty thousand men.Their tartans they were waving wide,Their glaives were glancing clear,The pibrochs rung frae side to side,Would deafen ye to hear.
Now haud your tongue, baith wife and carle,And listen, great and sma’,And I will sing of Glenallan’s EarlThat fought on the red Harlaw.The cronach’s cried on Bennachie,And doun the Don and a’,And hieland and lawland may mournfu’ beFor the sair field of Harlaw.They saddled a hundred milk-white steeds,They hae bridled a hundred black,With a chafron of steel on each horse’s head,And a good knight upon his back.They hadna ridden a mile, a mile,A mile, but barely ten,When Donald came branking down the braeWi’ twenty thousand men.Their tartans they were waving wide,Their glaives were glancing clear,The pibrochs rung frae side to side,Would deafen ye to hear.
Now haud your tongue, baith wife and carle,And listen, great and sma’,And I will sing of Glenallan’s EarlThat fought on the red Harlaw.
The cronach’s cried on Bennachie,And doun the Don and a’,And hieland and lawland may mournfu’ beFor the sair field of Harlaw.
They saddled a hundred milk-white steeds,They hae bridled a hundred black,With a chafron of steel on each horse’s head,And a good knight upon his back.
They hadna ridden a mile, a mile,A mile, but barely ten,When Donald came branking down the braeWi’ twenty thousand men.
Their tartans they were waving wide,Their glaives were glancing clear,The pibrochs rung frae side to side,Would deafen ye to hear.
HARLAW
The great Earl in his stirrups stoodThat Highland host to see;“Now here a knight that’s stout and goodMay prove a jeopardie:“What wouldst thou do, my squire so gay,That rides beside my reyne,Were ye Glenallan’s Earl the day,And I were Roland Cheyne?“To turn the rein were sin and shame,To fight were wondrous peril,What would ye do now, Roland Cheyne,Were ye Glenallan’s Earl?”“Were I Glenallan’s Earl this tideAnd ye were Roland Cheyne,The spur should be in my horse’s side,And the bridle upon his mane.“If they hae twenty thousand blades,And we twice ten times ten,Yet they hae but their tartan plaids,And we are mail-clad men.“My horse shall ride through ranks sae rude,As through the moorland fern,Then ne’er let the gentle Norman bludeGrow cauld for Highland kerne.”
The great Earl in his stirrups stoodThat Highland host to see;“Now here a knight that’s stout and goodMay prove a jeopardie:“What wouldst thou do, my squire so gay,That rides beside my reyne,Were ye Glenallan’s Earl the day,And I were Roland Cheyne?“To turn the rein were sin and shame,To fight were wondrous peril,What would ye do now, Roland Cheyne,Were ye Glenallan’s Earl?”“Were I Glenallan’s Earl this tideAnd ye were Roland Cheyne,The spur should be in my horse’s side,And the bridle upon his mane.“If they hae twenty thousand blades,And we twice ten times ten,Yet they hae but their tartan plaids,And we are mail-clad men.“My horse shall ride through ranks sae rude,As through the moorland fern,Then ne’er let the gentle Norman bludeGrow cauld for Highland kerne.”
The great Earl in his stirrups stoodThat Highland host to see;“Now here a knight that’s stout and goodMay prove a jeopardie:
“What wouldst thou do, my squire so gay,That rides beside my reyne,Were ye Glenallan’s Earl the day,And I were Roland Cheyne?
“To turn the rein were sin and shame,To fight were wondrous peril,What would ye do now, Roland Cheyne,Were ye Glenallan’s Earl?”
“Were I Glenallan’s Earl this tideAnd ye were Roland Cheyne,The spur should be in my horse’s side,And the bridle upon his mane.
“If they hae twenty thousand blades,And we twice ten times ten,Yet they hae but their tartan plaids,And we are mail-clad men.
“My horse shall ride through ranks sae rude,As through the moorland fern,Then ne’er let the gentle Norman bludeGrow cauld for Highland kerne.”
In this novel Scott began his practice of inventing mottoes, mainly from “Old Plays,” for the headings of his chapters, and among these scrapsare plain warrants for his title of poet. When they were collected into a little volume he owned that he could not, in all cases, profess to be certain of his authorship. His memory of the works of others was better than his memory of his own. “Pretty verses these, are they Byron’s?” he said, on hearing some lady sing Cleveland’s song fromThe Pirate. Of his memory Hogg tells the following anecdote, which may be given verbatim, as Hogg’sDomestic Manners of Sir Walter Scottis a rather rare little book.
“He, and Skene of Rubislaw, and I were out one night about midnight, leistering kippers in Tweed, about the end of January, not long after the opening of the river for fishing, which was then on the tenth, and Scott having a great range of the river himself, we went up to the side of the rough haugh of Elibank; but when we came to kindle our light, behold, our peat was gone out. This was a terrible disappointment, but to think of giving up our sport was out of the question, so we had no other shift save to send Bob Fletcher all the way through the darkness, the distance of two miles, for another fiery peat.