Chapter 13

whilst Scott seems half to admit that his conduct required justification, and urges that he sacrificed to literature very fair chances in his original profession. Many people might, perhaps, be disposed to take a bolder line of defence. Cut out of English fiction all that which has owed its birth more or less to a desire of earning money honourably, and the residue would be painfully small. The truth, indeed, seems to be simple. No good work is done when the one impelling motive is the desire of making a little money; but some of the best work that has ever been done has been indirectly due to the impecuniosity of the labourers. When a man is empty he makes a very poor job of it, in straining colourless trash from his hardbound brains; but when his mind is full to bursting he may still require the spur of a moderate craving for cash to induce him to take the decisive plunge. Scott illustrates both cases. The melancholy drudgery of his later years was forced from him in spite of nature; but nobody ever wrote more spontaneously than Scott when he was composing his early poems and novels. If the precedent of Shakespeare is good for anything, it is good for this. Shakespeare, it may be, had a more moderate ambition; but there seems to be no reason why the desire of a good house at Stratford should be intrinsically nobler than the desire of a fine estate at Abbotsford. But then, it is urged, Scott allowed himself to write with preposterous haste. And Shakespeare, who never blotted a line! What is the great difference between them? Mr. Carlyle feels that here too Scott has at least a very good precedent to allege; but he endeavours to establish a distinction. It was right, he says, for Shakespeare to write rapidly, 'being ready to do it. And herein truly lies the secret of the matter; such swiftness of writing, after due energy of preparation, is, doubtless, the right method; the hot furnace having long worked and simmered, let the pure gold flow out at one gush.' Could there be a better description of Scott in his earlier years? He published his first poem of any pretensions at thirty-four, an age which Shelley and Keats never reached, and which Byron only passed by two years. 'Waverley' came out when he was forty-three--most of our modern novelists have written themselves out long before they arrive at that respectable period of life. From a child he had been accumulating the knowledge and the thoughts that at last found expression in his work. He had been a teller of stories before he was well in breeches; and had worked hard till middle life in accumulating vast stores of picturesque imagery. The delightful notes to all his books give us some impression of the fulness of mind which poured forth a boundless torrent of anecdote to the guests at Abbotsford. We only repine at the prodigality of the harvest when we forget the long process of culture by which it was produced. And, more than this, when we look at the peculiar characteristics of Scott's style--that easy flow of narrative never heightening into epigram, and indeed, to speak the truth, full of slovenly blunders and amazing grammatical solecisms, but also always full of a charm of freshness and fancy most difficult to analyse--we may well doubt whether much labour would have improved or injured him. No man ever depended more on the perfectly spontaneous flow of his narratives. Carlyle quotes Schiller against him, amongst other and greater names. We need not attempt to compare the two men; but do not Schiller's tragedies smell rather painfully of the lamp? Does not the professor of æsthetics pierce a little too distinctly through the exterior of the poet? And, for one example, are not Schiller's excellent but remarkably platitudinous peasants in 'William Tell' miserably colourless alongside of Scott's rough border dalesmen, racy of speech, and redolent of their native soil in every word and gesture? To every man his method according to his talent. Scott is the most perfectly delightful of story-tellers, and it is the very essence of story-telling that it should not follow prescribed canons of criticism, but be as natural as the talk by firesides, and, it is to be feared, over many gallons of whisky-toddy, of which it is, in fact, the refined essence. Scott skims off the cream of his varied stores of popular tradition and antiquarian learning with strange facility; but he had tramped through many a long day's march, and pored over innumerable ballads and forgotten writers, before he had anything to skim. Had he not--if we may use the word without offence--been cramming all his life, and practising the art of story-telling every day he lived? Probably the most striking incidents of his books are in reality mere modifications of anecdotes which he had rehearsed a hundred times before, just disguised enough to fit into his story. Who can read, for example, the inimitable legend of the blind piper in 'Redgauntlet' without seeing that it bears all the marks of long elaboration as clearly as one of those discourses of Whitfield, which, by constant repetition, became marvels of dramatic art? He was an impromptu composer, in the sense that when his anecdotes once reached paper, they flowed rapidly, and were little corrected; but the correction must have been substantially done in many cases long before they appeared in the state of 'copy.'

Let us, however, pursue the indictment a little further. Scott did not believe in anything in particular. Yet once more, did Shakespeare? There is surely a poetry of doubt as well as a poetry of conviction, or what shall we say to 'Hamlet'? Appearing in such an age as the end of the last and the beginning of this century, Scott could but share the intellectual atmosphere in which he was born, and at that day, whatever we may think of this, few people had any strong faith to boast of. Why should not a poet stand aside from the chaos of conflicting opinions, so far as he was able to extricate himself from the unutterable confusion around them, and show us what was beautiful in the world as he saw it, without striving to combine the office of prophet with his more congenial occupation? Carlyle did not mean to urge so feeble a criticism as that Scott had no very uncompromising belief in the Thirty-nine Articles; for that is a weakness which he would share with his critic and with his critic's idol, Goethe. The meaning is partly given by another phrase. 'While Shakespeare works from the heart outwards, Scott,' says Carlyle, 'works from the skin inwards, never getting near the heart of men.' The books are addressed entirely to the everyday mind. They have nothing to do with emotions or principles, beyond those of the ordinary country gentleman; and, we may add, of the country gentleman with his digestion in good order, and his hereditary gout still in the distant future. The more inspiring thoughts, the deeper passions, are seldom roused. If in his width of sympathy, and his vivid perception of character within certain limits, he reminds us of Shakespeare, we can find no analogy in his writings to the passion of 'Romeo and Juliet,' or to the intellectual agony of 'Hamlet.' The charge is not really that Scott lacks faith, but that he never appeals, one way or the other, to the faculties which make faith a vital necessity to some natures, or lead to a desperate revolt against established faiths in others. If Byron and Scott could have been combined; if the energetic passions of the one could have been joined to the healthy nature and quick sympathies of the other, we might have seen another Shakespeare in the nineteenth century. As it is, both of them are maimed and imperfect on different sides. It is, in fact, remarkable how Scott fails when he attempts a flight into the regions where he is less at home than in his ordinary style. Take, for instance, a passage from 'Rob Roy,' where our dear friend, the Bailie, Nicol Jarvie, is taken prisoner by Rob Roy's amiable wife, and appeals to her feelings of kinship. '"I dinna ken," said the undaunted Bailie, "if the kindred has ever been weel redd out to you yet, cousin--but it's kenned, and can be proved. My mother, Elspeth Macfarlane (otherwise Macgregor), was the wife of my father, Denison Nicol Jarvie (peace be with them baith), and Elspeth was the daughter of Farlane Macfarlane (or MacGregor), at the shielding of Loch Sloy. Now this Farlane Macfarlane (or Macgregor), as his surviving daughter, Maggy Macfarlane, wha married Duncan Macnab of Stuckavrallachan, can testify, stood as near to your gudeman, Robin MacGregor, as in the fourth degree of kindred, fur----"

'The virago lopped the genealogical tree by demanding haughtily if a stream of rushing water acknowledged any relation with the portion withdrawn from it for the mean domestic uses of those who dwelt on its banks?'

The Bailie is as real a human being as ever lived--as the present Lord Mayor, or Dandie Dinmont, or Sir Walter himself; but Mrs. Macgregor has obviously just stepped off the boards of a minor theatre, devoted to the melodrama. As long as Scott keeps to his strong ground, his figures are as good flesh and blood as ever walked in the Saltmarket of Glasgow; when once he tries his heroics, he too often manufactures his characters from the materials used by the frequenters of masked balls. Yet there are many such occasions on which his genius does not desert him. Balfour of Burley may rub shoulders against genuine Covenanters and west-country Whigs without betraying his fictitious origin. The Master of Ravenswood attitudinises a little too much with his Spanish cloak and his slouched hat; but we feel really sorry for him when he disappears in the Kelpie's Flow. And when Scott has to do with his own peasants, with the thoroughbred Presbyterian Scotchman, he can bring intense tragic interest from his homely materials. Douce Davie Deans, distracted between his religious principles and his desire of saving his daughter's life, and seeking relief even in the midst of his agonies by that admirable burst of spiritual pride: 'Though I will neither exalt myself nor pull down others, I wish that every man and woman in this land had kept the true testimony and the middle and straight path, as it were on the ridge of a hill, where wind and water steals, avoiding right-hand snare and extremes, and left-hand way-slidings, as well as Johnny Dodds of Farthy's acre and ae man mair that shall be nameless'--Davie is as admirable a figure as ever appeared in fiction. It is a pity that he was mixed up with the conventional madwoman, Madge Wildfire, and that a story most touching in its native simplicity, was twisted and tortured into needless intricacy. The religious exaltation of Balfour, or the religious pigheadedness of Davie Deans, are indeed given from the point of view of the kindly humourist, rather than of one who can fully sympathise with the sublimity of an intense faith in a homely exterior. And though many good judges hold the 'Bride of Lammermoor' to be Scott's best performance, in virtue of the loftier passions which animate the chief actors in the tragedy, we are, after all, called upon to sympathise as much with the gentleman of good family who can't ask his friends to dinner without an unworthy device to hide his poverty, as with the passionate lover whose mistress has her heart broken. In truth, this criticism as to the absence of high passion reminds us again that Scott was a thorough Scotsman, and--for it is necessary, even now, to avoid the queer misconception which confounds together the most distinct races--a thorough Saxon. He belonged, that is, to the race which has in the most eminent degree the typical English qualities. Especially his intellect had a strong substratum of downright dogged common sense; his religion, one may conjecture, was pretty much that of all men of sense in his time. It was that of the society which had produced and been influenced by Hume and Adam Smith; which had dropped its old dogmas without becoming openly sceptical, but which emphatically took 'common sense' for the motto of its philosophy. It was equally afraid of bigotry and scepticism and had manufactured a creed out of decent compromises which served well enough for ordinary purposes. Even Hume, a sceptic in theory, was a Tory and a Scottish patriot in politics. Scott, who cared nothing for abstract philosophy, did not bother himself to form any definite system of opinions; he shared Hume's political prejudices without inquiring into his philosophy. He thoroughly detested the dogmatism of the John Knox variety, and considered the Episcopal Church to offer the religion for a gentleman. But his common sense in such matters was chiefly shown by not asking awkward questions and adopting the creed which was most to his taste without committing himself to any strong persuasion as to abstract truth. He would, on the whole, leave such matters alone, an attitude of mind which was not to Carlyle's taste. In the purely artistic direction, this common sense is partly responsible for the defect which has been so often noticed in Scott's heroes. Your genuine Scot is indeed as capable of intense passion as any human being in the world. Burns is proof enough of the fact if anyone doubted it. But Scott was a man of more massive and less impulsive character. If he had strong passions, they were ruled by his common sense; he kept them well in hand, and did not write till the period of youthful effervescence was over. His heroes always seem to be described from the point of view of a man old enough to see the folly of youthful passion or too old fully to sympathise with it. They are chiefly remarkable for a punctilious pride which gives their creator some difficulty in keeping them out of superfluous duels. When they fall in love, they always seem to feel themselves as Lovel felt himself in the 'Antiquary,' under the eye of Jonathan Oldbuck, who was himself once in love but has come to see that he was a fool for his pains. Certainly, somehow or other, they are apt to be terribly wooden. Cranstoun in the 'Lay of the Last Minstrel,' Graeme in the 'Lady of the Lake,' or Wilton in 'Marmion,' are all unspeakable bores. Waverley himself, and Lovel in the 'Antiquary,' and Vanbeest Brown in 'Guy Mannering,' and Harry Morton in 'Old Mortality,' and, in short, the whole series of Scott's pattern young men, are all chips of the same block. They can all run, and ride, and fight, and make pretty speeches, and express the most becoming sentiments; but somehow they all partake of one fault, the same which was charged against the otherwise incomparable horse, namely, that they are dead. And we must confess that this is a considerable drawback from Scott's novels. To take the passion out of a novel is something like taking the sunlight out of a landscape; and to condemn all the heroes to be utterly commonplace is to remove the centre of interest in a manner detrimental to the best intents of the story. When Thackeray endeavoured to restore Rebecca to her rightful place in 'Ivanhoe,' he was only doing what is more or less desirable in all the series. We long to dismount these insipid creatures from the pride of place, and to supplant them by some of the admirable characters who are doomed to play subsidiary parts. There is, however, another reason for this weakness which seems to be overlooked by many of Scott's critics. We are often referred to Scott as a master of pure and what is called 'objective' story-telling. Certainly I don't deny that Scott could be an admirable story-teller: 'Ivanhoe' and the 'Bride of Lammermoor' would be sufficient to convict me of error if I did. But as mere stories, many of his novels--and moreover his masterpieces--are not only faulty, but distinctly bad. Taking him purely and simply from that point of view, he is very inferior, for example, to Alexandre Dumas. You cannot follow the thread of most of his narratives with any particular interest in the fate of the chief actors. In the 'Introductory Epistle' prefixed to the 'Fortunes of Nigel' Scott himself gives a very interesting account of his method. He has often, he says in answer to an imaginary critic, begun by laying down a plan of his work and tried to construct an ideal story, evolving itself by due degrees and ending by a proper catastrophe. But, a demon seats himself on his pen, and leads it astray. Characters expand; incidents multiply; the story lingers while the materials increase; Bailie Jarvie or Dugald Dalgetty leads him astray, and he goes many a weary mile from the regular road and has to leap hedge and ditch to get back. If he resists the temptation, his imagination flags and he becomes prosy and dull. No one can read his best novels without seeing the truth of this description. 'Waverley' made an immense success as a description of new scenes and social conditions: the story of Waverley himself is the least interesting part of the book. Everybody who has read 'Guy Mannering' remembers Dandie Dinmont and Meg Merrilies and Pleydell and Dominie Sampson; but how many people could explain the ostensible story--the love affair of Vanbeest Brown and Julia Mannering? We can see how Scott put the story together. He was pouring out the most vivid and interesting recollections of the borderers whom he knew so well, of the old Scottish gentry and smugglers and peasants, and the old-fashioned lawyers who played high jinks in the wynds of Edinburgh. No more delightful collection of portraits could be brought together. But he had to get a story as a thread. He started with the legend about an astrological prediction told of Dryden and one of his sons, and mixed it up with the Annesley case, where a claimant turned up with more plausibility than the notorious Orton. This introduced of necessity an impossible and conventional bit of lovemaking and a recognition of a long-lost heir. He is full of long-lost heirs. Equally conventional and impossible stories are introduced in the 'Antiquary,' the 'Heart of Midlothian,' and the 'Legend of Montrose' and elsewhere. Nobody cares about them, and the characters which ostensibly play the chief part serve merely to introduce us to the subordinate actors. 'Waverley,' for example, gives a description drawn with unsurpassable spirit of the state of the Highland clans in 1745; and poor Waverley's love affair passes altogether out of sight during the greatest and most interesting part of the narrative. When Moore said of the poems that Scott intended to illustrate all the gentlemen's seats between Edinburgh and London, he was not altogether wide of the mark. The novels are all illustrations--not of 'gentlemen's seats' indeed, but of various social states; and it is only by a kind of happy accident when this interest in the surroundings does not put the chief characters out of focus. Nobody has created a greater number of admirable types, but when we run over their names we perceive that in most cases they are the secondary performers who are ousting the nominal heroes and heroines from their places. Dugald Dalgetty, for example, becomes so attractive that he squeezes all the other actors into a mere corner of the canvas. Perhaps nothing more is necessary to explain why Scott failed as a dramatist. With him, Hamlet would have been a mere peg to show us how Rosencrantz and Guildenstern amused themselves at the royal drinking parties.