Chapter 14

For this reason, again, Scott bestows an apparently disproportionate amount of imagination upon the mere scene-painting, the external trappings, the clothes, or dwelling-places of his performers. A traveller into a strange country naturally gives us the external peculiarities which strike him. Scott has to tell us what 'completed the costume' of his Highland chiefs or mediæval barons. He took, in short, to that 'buff-jerkin' business of which Carlyle speaks so contemptuously, and fairly carried away the hearts of his contemporaries by a lavish display of mediæval upholstery. Lockhart tells us that Scott could not bear the commonplace daubings of walls with uniform coats of white, blue, and grey. All the roofs at Abbotsford 'were, in appearance at least, of carved oak, relieved by coats-of-arms duly blazoned at the intersections of beams, and resting on cornices, to the eye of the same material, but composed of casts in plaster of Paris, after the foliage, the flowers, the grotesque monsters and dwarfs, and sometimes the beautiful heads of nuns and confessors, on which he had doated from infancy among the cloisters of Melrose Abbey.' The plaster looks as well as the carved oak for a time; but the day speedily comes when the sham crumbles into ashes, and Scott's knights and nobles, like his carved cornices, became dust in the next generation. It is hard to say it, and yet we fear it must be admitted, that many of those historical novels, which once charmed all men, and for which we have still a lingering affection, are rapidly converting themselves into mere débris of plaster of Paris. Sir F. Palgrave says somewhere that 'historical novels are mortal enemies to history,' and we are often tempted to add that they are mortal enemies to fiction. There maybe an exception or two, but as a rule the task is simply impracticable. The novelist is bound to come so near to the facts that we feel the unreality of his portraits. Either the novel becomes pure cram, a dictionary of antiquities dissolved in a thin solution of romance, or, which is generally more refreshing, it takes leave of accuracy altogether and simply takes the plot and the costume from history, but allows us to feel that genuine moderns are masquerading in the dress of a bygone century. Even in the last case, it generally results in a kind of dance in fetters and a comparative breakdown under self-imposed obligations. 'Ivanhoe' and 'Kenilworth' and 'Quentin Durward,' and the rest are of course audacious anachronisms for the genuine historian. Scott was imposed upon by his own fancy. He was probably not aware that his Balfour of Burley was real flesh and blood, because painted from real people round him, while his Claverhouse is made chiefly of plumes and jackboots. Scott is chiefly responsible for the odd perversion of facts, which reached its height, as Macaulay remarks, in the marvellous performance of our venerated ruler, George IV. That monarch, he observes, 'thought that he could not give a more striking proof of his respect for the usages which had prevailed in Scotland before the Union than by disguising himself in what, before the Union, was considered by nine Scotchmen out of ten as the dress of a thief.' The passage recalls the too familiar anecdote about Scott and the wine-glass consecrated by the sacred lips of his king. At one of the portrait exhibitions in South Kensington was hung up a representation of George IV., with the body of a stalwart highlander in full costume, some seven or eight feet high; the face formed from the red puffy cheeks developed by innumerable bottles of port and burgundy at Carlton House; and the whole surmounted by a bonnet with waving plumes. Scott was chiefly responsible for disguising that elderly London debauchee in the costume of a wild Gaelic cattle-stealer, and was apparently insensible of the gross absurdity. We are told that an air of burlesque was thrown over the proceedings at Holyrood by the apparition of a true London alderman in the same costume as his master. An alderman who could burlesque such a monarch must indeed have been a credit to his turtle-soup. Let us pass by with a brief lamentation that so great and good a man laid himself open to Carlyle's charge of sham worship. We have lost our love of buff jerkins and other scraps from mediæval museums, and Scott is suffering from having preferred working in stucco to carving in marble. We are perhaps inclined to saddle Scott unconsciously with the sins of a later generation. Borrow, in his delightful 'Lavengro,' meets a kind of Jesuit in disguise in that sequestered dell where he beats 'the Blazing Tinman.' The Jesuit, if I remember rightly, confides to him that Scott was a tool of that diabolical conspiracy which has infected our old English Protestantism with the poison of modern Popery. And, though the evil may be traced further back, and was due to more general causes than the influence of any one writer, Scott was clearly responsible in his degree for certain recent phenomena. The buff jerkin became the lineal ancestor of various copes, stoles, and chasubles which stink in the nostrils of honest dissenters. Our modern revivalists profess to despise the flimsiness of the first attempts in this direction. They laugh at the carpenter's Gothic of Abbotsford or Strawberry Hill, and do not ask themselves how their own more elaborate blundering will look in the eyes of a future generation. What will our posterity think of our masquerading in old clothes? Will they want a new Cromwell to sweep away nineteenth-century shams, as his ancestors smashed mediæval ruins, or will they, as we may rather hope, be content to let our pretentious rubbish find its natural road to ruin? One thing is pretty certain, and in its way comforting; that, however far the rage for revivalism may be pushed, nobody will ever want to revive the nineteenth century. But for Scott, in spite of his complicity in this wearisome process, there is something still to be said. 'Ivanhoe' cannot be given up. The vivacity of the description--the delight with which Scott throws himself into the pursuit of his knicknacks and antiquarian rubbish, has something contagious about it. 'Ivanhoe,' let it be granted, is no longer a work for men, but it still is, or still ought to be, delightful reading for boys. The ordinary boy, indeed, when he reads anything, seems to choose descriptions of the cricket-matches and boat-races in which his soul most delights. But there must still be some unsophisticated youths who can relish 'Robinson Crusoe' and the 'Arabian Nights' and other favourites of our own childhood, and such at least should pore over the 'Gentle and free passage of arms at Ashby,' admire those incredible feats with the long-bow which would have enabled Robin Hood to meet successfully a modern volunteer armed with the Martini-Henry, and follow the terrific head-breaking of Front-de-Boeuf, Bois-Guilbert, the holy clerk of Copmanshurst, and the _Noir Fainéant_, even to the time when, for no particular reason beyond the exigencies of the story, the Templar suddenly falls from his horse, and is discovered, to our no small surprise, to be 'unscathed by the lance of the enemy,' and to have died a victim to the violence of his own contending passions. If 'Ivanhoe' has been exploded by Professor Freeman, it did good work in its day. If it were possible for a critic to weigh the merits of a great man in a balance, and to decide precisely how far his excellences exceed his defects, we should have to set off Scott's real services to the spread of a genuine historical spirit against the encouragement which he afforded to its bastard counterfeit. To enable us rightly to appreciate our forefathers, to recognise that they were living men, and to feel our close connection with them, is to put a vivid imagination to one of its worthiest uses. It was perhaps inevitable that we should learn to appreciate our ancestors by paying them the doubtful compliment of external mimicry; and that only by slow degrees, and at the price of much humiliating experience, should we learn the simple lesson that a childish adult has not the grace of childhood. Even in his errors, however, Scott had the merit of unconsciousness, which is fast disappearing from our more elaborate affectations; and, therefore, though we regret, we are not irritated by his weakness and deficiency in true insight. He really enjoys his playthings too naïvely for the pleasure not to be a little contagious, when we can descend from our critical dignity. In his later work, indeed, the effort becomes truly painful, tending more to the provocation of sadness than of anger. But that work is best forgotten except as an occasional warning.

Scott, however, understood, and nobody has better illustrated by example, the true mode of connecting past and present. Mr. Palgrave, whose recognition of the charm of Scott's lyrics merits our gratitude, observes in the notes to the 'Golden Treasury' that the songs about Brignall banks and Rosabelle exemplify 'the peculiar skill with which Scott employs proper names;' nor, he adds, 'is there a surer sign of high poetical genius.' The last remark might possibly be disputed; if Milton possessed the same talent, so did Lord Macaulay, whose ballads, admirable as they are, are not first-rate poetry; but the conclusion to which the remark points is one which is illustrated by each of these cases. The secret of the power is simply this, that a man whose mind is full of historical associations somehow communicates to us something of the sentiment which they awake in himself. Scott, as all who saw him tell us, could never see an old tower, or a bank, or a rush of a stream without instantly recalling a boundless collection of appropriate anecdotes. He might be quoted as a case in point by those who would explain all poetical imagination by the power of associating ideas. He is the poet of association. A proper name acts upon him like a charm. It calls up the past days, the heroes of the '41, or the skirmish of Drumclog, or the old Covenanting times, by a spontaneous and inexplicable magic. When the barest natural object is taken into his imagination, all manner of past fancies and legends crystallise around it at once.

Though it is more difficult to explain how the same glow which ennobled them to him is conveyed to his readers, the process somehow takes place. We catch the enthusiasm. A word, which strikes us as a bare abstraction in the report of the Censor General, say, or in a collection of poor law returns, gains an entirely new significance when he touches it in the most casual manner. A kind of mellowing atmosphere surrounds all objects in his pages, and tinges them with poetical hues. Even the Scottish dialect, repulsive to some ignorant Southrons, becomes musical to his true admirers. In this power lies one secret of Scott's most successful writing. Thus, for example, I often fancy that the second title of 'Waverley'--''Tis Sixty Years Since'--indicates precisely the distance of time at which a romantic novelist should place himself from his creations. They are just far enough from us to have acquired a certain picturesque colouring, which conceals the vulgarity, and yet leaves them living and intelligible beings. His best stories might be all described as 'Tales of a Grandfather.' They have the charm of anecdotes told to the narrator by some old man who had himself been part of what he describes. Scott's best novels depend, for their deep interest, upon the scenery and society with which he had been familiar in his early days, more or less harmonised by removal to what we may call, in a different sense from the common one, the twilight of history; that period, namely, from which the broad glare of the present has departed, and which we can yet dimly observe without making use of the dark lantern of ancient historians, and accepting the guidance of Dryasdust. Dandie Dinmont, though a contemporary of Scott's youth, represented a fast perishing phase of society; and Balfour of Burley, though his day was past, had yet left his mantle with many spiritual descendants who were scarcely less familiar. Between the times so fixed Scott seems to exhibit his genuine power; and within these limits we should find it hard to name any second, or indeed any third.

Indeed, when we have gone as far as we please in denouncing shams, ridiculing men in buff-jerkins, and the whole Wardour Street business of gimcrack and Brummagem antiquities, it still remains true that Scott's great service was what we may call the vivification of history. He made us feel, it is generally said, as no one had ever made us feel before, that the men of the past were once real human beings; and I can agree if I am permitted to make a certain distinction. His best service, I should say, was not so much in showing us the past as it was when it was present; but in showing us the past as it is really still present. His knights and crusaders and feudal nobles are after all unreal, and the best critics felt even in his own day that his greatest triumphs were in describing the Scottish peasantry of his time. Dandie Dinmont and Jeanie Deans and their like are better than many Front de Boeufs and Robin Hoods. It is in dealing with his own contemporaries that he really shows the imaginative insight which entitles him to be called a great creator as well as an amusing story-teller. But this, rightly stated, is not inconsistent with the previous statement. For the special characteristic of Scott as distinguished from his predecessors is precisely his clear perception that the characters whom he loved so well and described so vividly were the products of a long historical evolution. His patriotism was the love of a country in which everything had obvious roots in its previous history. The stout farmer Dinmont was the descendant of the old borderers; the Deanses were survivals from the days of the Covenanters or of John Knox; every peculiarity upon which he delighted to dwell was invested with all the charm of descent from a long and picturesque history. When Fielding describes the squires or lawyers of the eighteenth century, he says nothing to show that he was even aware of the existence of a seventeenth, or still less of a sixteenth century. Scott can describe no character without assigning to it its place in the social organism which has been growing up since the earliest dawn of history. This was, of course, no accident. He came at the time when the little provincial centres were just feeling the first invasion of the great movements from without. Edinburgh, whether quite comparable to Athens or not, had been for two or three generations a remarkable centre of intellectual cultivation. Hume and Adam Smith were only the most conspicuous members of a society which monopolised pretty well all the philosophy which existed in the island and a great deal of the history and criticism. In Scott's time the patriotic feeling which had been a blind instinct was becoming more or less self-conscious. The literary society in which Scott was leader of the Tories, and Jeffrey of the Whigs, included a large proportion of the best intellect of the time and was sufficiently in contact with the outside world to be conscious of its own characteristics. When the crash of the French Revolution came in Scott's youth, Burke denounced its _à priori_ abstract reasonings in the name of prescription. A traditional order and belief were essential, as he urged, to the well-being of every human society. What Scott did afterwards was precisely to show by concrete instances, most vividly depicted, the value and interest of a natural body of traditions. Like many other of his ablest contemporaries, he saw with alarm the great movement, of which the French Revolution was the obvious embodiment, sweeping away all manner of local traditions and threatening to engulf the little society which still retained its specific character in Scotland. He was stirred, too, in his whole nature when any sacrilegious reformer threatened to sweep away any part of the true old Scottish system. And this is, in fact, the moral implicitly involved in Scott's best work. Take the beggar, for example, Edie Ochiltree, the old 'bluegown.' Beggars, you say, are a nuisance and would be sentenced to starvation by Mr. Malthus in the name of an abstract principle of population. But look, says Scott, at the old-fashioned beggar as he really was. He had his place in society; he was the depository of the legends of the whole country-side: chatting with the lairds, the confidential friend of fishermen, peasants, and farmers; the oracle in all sports and ruler of village feasts; repaying in friendly offices far more than the value of the alms which he took as a right; a respecter of old privileges, because he had privileges himself; and ready when the French came to take his part in fighting for the old country. There can be no fear for a country, says Scott, where even the beggar is as ready to take up arms as the noble. The bluegown, in short, is no waif and stray, no product of social corruption, or mere obnoxious parasite, but a genuine member of the fabric, who could respect himself and scorn servility as much as the highest members of the social hierarchy. Scott, as Lockhart tells us, was most grievously wounded by the insults of the Radical mob in Selkirk, who cried 'Burke Sir Walter!' in the place where all men had loved and honoured him. It was the meeting of the old and new, and the revelation to Scott in brutal terms of the new spirit which was destroying all the old social ties. Scott and Wordsworth and Coleridge and Southey and their like saw in fact the approach of that industrial revolution, as we call it now, which for good or evil has been ever since developing. The Radicals denounced them as mere sentimentalists; the solid Whigs, who fancied that the revolution was never to get beyond the Reform Bill of 1832, laughed at them as mere obstructives; by us, who, whatever our opinions, speak with the advantage of later experience, it must be admitted that such Conservatism had its justification, and that good and far-seeing men might well look with alarm at changes whose far-reaching consequences cannot yet be estimated. Scott, meanwhile, is the incomparable painter of the sturdy race which he loved so well--a race high-spirited, loyal to its principles, surpassingly energetic, full of strong affections and manly spirits, if crabbed, bigoted, and capable of queer perversity and narrow self-conceit. Nor, if we differ from his opinions, can anyone who desires to take a reasonable view of history doubt the interest and value of the conceptions involved. Scott was really the first imaginative observer who saw distinctly how the national type of character is the product of past history, and embodies all the great social forces by which it has slowly shaped itself. That is the new element in his portraiture of human life; and we may pardon him if he set rather too high a value upon the picturesque elements which he had been the first to recognise. One of the acutest of recent writers upon politics, the late Mr. Bagehot, has insisted upon the immense value of what he called a 'solid cake of customs,' and the thought is more or less familiar to every writer of the evolutionist way of thinking. Scott, without any philosophy to speak of, political or otherwise, saw and recognised intuitively a typical instance. He saw how much the social fabric had been woven out of ancient tradition; and he made others see it more clearly than could be done by any abstract reasoner.

When naturalists wish to preserve a skeleton, they bury an animal in an ant-hill and dig him up after many days with all the perishable matter fairly eaten away. That is the process which great men have to undergo. A vast multitude of insignificant, unknown, and unconscious critics destroy what has no genuine power of resistance, and leave the remainder for posterity. Much disappears in every case, and it is a question, perhaps, whether the firmer parts of Scott's reputation will be sufficiently coherent to resist after the removal of the rubbish. We must admit that even his best work is of more or less mixed value, and that the test will be a severe one. Yet we hope, not only for reasons already suggested, but for one which remains to be expressed. The ultimate source of pleasure derivable from all art is that it brings you into communication with the artist. What you really love in the picture or the poem is the painter or the poet whom it brings into sympathy with you across the gulf of time. He tells you what are the thoughts which some fragment of natural scenery, or some incident of human life, excited in a mind greatly wiser and more perceptive than your own. A dramatist or a novelist professes to describe different actors on his little scene, but he is really setting forth the varying phases of his own mind. And so Dandie Dinmont, or the Antiquary, or Balfour of Burley, is merely the conductor through which Scott's personal magnetism affects our own natures. And certainly, whatever faults a critic may discover in the work, it may be said that no work in our literature places us in communication with a manlier or more lovable nature. Scott, indeed, setting up as the landed proprietor at Abbotsford, and solacing himself with painted plaster of Paris instead of carved oak, does not strike us, any more than he does Carlyle, as a very noble phenomenon. But luckily for us, we have also the Scott who must have been the most charming of all conceivable companions; the Scott who was idolised even by a judicious pig; the Scott, who, unlike the irritable race of literary magnates in general, never lost a friend, and whose presence diffused an equable glow of kindly feeling to the farthest limits of the social system which gravitated round him. He was not precisely brilliant; nobody, so far as we know, who wrote so many sentences has left so few that have fixed themselves upon us as established commonplaces; beyond that unlucky phrase about 'my name being MacGregor and my foot being on my native heath'--which is not a very admirable sentiment--I do not at present remember a single gem of this kind. Landor, I think, said that in the whole of Scott's poetry there was only one good line, that, namely, in the poem about Helvellyn referring to the dog of the lost man--

When the wind waved his garments, how oft didst thou start!