Chapter 2

And _The Lady of the Lake_ is all that the Highlands meant for Scott at that time. But _Rokeby_ has little substance, though it includes more than one of Scott's finest songs. _The Lord of the Isles_, though its battle is not too far below _Marmion_, and though its hero is Robert the Bruce, yet wants the original force of the earlier romances. When Scott changed his hand from verse to prose for story-telling and wrote _Waverley_, he not only gained in freedom and got room for a kind of dialogue that was impossible in rhyme, but he came back to the same sort of experience and the same strength of tradition as had given life to the _Lay_. The time of _Waverley_ was no more than sixty years since, when Scott began to write it and mislaid and forgot the opening chapters in 1805; he got his ideas of the Forty-five from an old Highland gentleman who had been out with the Highland clans, following the lead of Prince Charles Edward, the Young Chevalier. The clans in that adventure belonged to a world more ancient than that of _Ivanhoe_ or _The Talisman_; they also belonged so nearly to Scott's own time that he heard their story from one of themselves. He had spoken and listened to another gentleman who had known Rob Roy. _The Bride of Lammermoor_ came to him as the Icelandic family histories came to the historians of Gunnar or Kjartan Olafsson. He had known the story all his life, and he wrote it from tradition. The time of _The Heart of Midlothian_ is earlier than _Waverley_, but it is more of a modern novel than an historical romance, and even _Old Mortality_, which is earlier still, is modern also; Cuddie Headrigg is no more antique than Dandie Dinmont or the Ettrick Shepherd himself, and even his mother and her Covenanting friends are not far from the fashion of some enthusiasts of Scott's own time--e.g. Hogg's religious uncle who could not be brought to repeat his old ballads for thinking of 'covenants broken, burned and buried.' _Guy Mannering_ and _The Antiquary_ are both modern stories: it is not till _Ivanhoe_ that Scott definitely starts on the regular historical novel in the manner that was found so easy to imitate.

If _Rob Roy_ is not the very best of them all--and on problems of that sort perhaps the right word may be the Irish phrase _Naboclish!_ ('don't trouble about that!') which Scott picked up when he was visiting Miss Edgeworth in Ireland--_Rob Roy_ shows well enough what Scott could do, in romance of adventure and in humorous dialogue. The plots of his novels are sometimes thought to be loose and ill-defined, and he tells us himself that he seldom knew where his story was carrying him. His young heroes are sometimes reckoned rather feeble and featureless. Francis Osbaldistone, like Edward Waverley and Henry Morton, drifts into trouble and has his destiny shaped for him by other people and accidents. But is this anything of a reproach to the author of the story? Then it must tell against some novelists who seem to work more conscientiously and carefully than Scott on the frame of their story--against George Meredith in Evan Harrington and Richard Feverel and Harry Richmond, all of whom are driven by circumstances and see their way no more clearly than Scott's young men. Is it not really the strength, not the weakness, of Scott's imagination that engages us in the perplexities of Waverley and Henry Morton even to the verge of tragedy--keeping out of tragedy because it is not his business, and would spoil his looser, larger, more varied web of a story? Francis Osbaldistone is less severely tried. His story sets him travelling, and may we not admire the skill of the author who uses the old device of a wandering hero with such good effect? The story is not a mere string of adventures--it is adventures with a bearing on the main issue, with complications that all tell in the end; chief among them, of course, the successive appearances of Mr. Campbell and the counsels of Diana Vernon. The scenes that bring out Scott's genius most completely--so they have always seemed to me--are those of Francis Osbaldistone's stay in Glasgow. Seldom has any novelist managed so easily so many different modes of interest. There is the place--in different lights--the streets, the river, the bridge, the Cathedral, the prison, seen through the suspense of the hero's mind, rendered in the talk of Bailie Nicol Jarvie and Andrew Fairservice; made alive, as the saying is, through successive anxieties and dangers; thrilling with romance, yet at the same time never beyond the range of ordinary common sense. Is it not a triumph, at the very lowest reckoning, of dexterous narrative to bring together in a vivid dramatic scene the humorous character of the Glasgow citizen and the equal and opposite humour of his cousin, the cateran, the Highland loon, Mr. Campbell disclosed as Rob Roy--with the Dougal creature helping him?

Scott's comedy is like that of Cervantes in _Don Quixote_--humorous dialogue independent of any definite comic plot and mixed up with all sorts of other business. Might not Falstaff himself be taken into comparison too? Scott's humorous characters are nowhere and never characters in a comedy--and Falstaff, the greatest comic character in Shakespeare, is not great in comedy.

Some of the rich idiomatic Scottish dialogue in the novels might be possibly disparaged (like Ben Jonson) as 'mere humours and observation.' Novelists of lower rank than Scott--Galt in _The Ayrshire Legatees_ and _Annals of the Parish_ and _The Entail_--have nearly rivalled Scott in reporting conversation. But the Bailie at any rate has his part to play in the story of _Rob Roy_--and so has Andrew Fairservice. Scott never did anything more ingenious than his contrast of those two characters--so much alike in language, and to some extent in cast of mind, with the same conceit and self-confidence, the same garrulous Westland security in their own judgment, both attentive to their own interests, yet clearly and absolutely distinct in spirit, the Bailie a match in courage for Rob Roy himself.

Give me leave, before I end, to read one example of Scott's language: from the scene in _Guy Mannering_ where Dandie Dinmont explains his case to Mr. Pleydell the advocate. It is true to life: memory and imagination here indistinguishable:--

Dinmont, who had pushed after Mannering into the room, began with a scrape of his foot and a scratch of his head in unison. 'I am Dandie Dinmont, sir, of the Charlies-hope--the Liddesdale lad--ye'll mind me? It was for me you won yon grand plea.'

'What plea, you loggerhead?' said the lawyer; 'd'ye think I can remember all the fools that come to plague me?'

'Lord, sir, it was the grand plea about the grazing o' the Langtae-head,' said the farmer.

'Well, curse thee, never mind;--give me the memorial, and come to me on Monday at ten,' replied the learned counsel.

'But, sir, I haena got ony distinct memorial.'

'No memorial, man?' said Pleydell.

'Na, sir, nae memorial,' answered Dandie; 'for your honour said before, Mr. Pleydell, ye'll mind, that ye liked best to hear us hill-folk tell our ane tale by word o' mouth.'

'Beshrew my tongue that said so!' answered the counsellor; 'it will cost my ears a dinning.--Well, say in two words what you've got to say--you see the gentleman waits.'

'Ou, sir, if the gentleman likes he may play his ain spring first; it's a' ane to Dandie.'

'Now, you looby,' said the lawyer, 'cannot you conceive that your business can be nothing to Colonel Mannering, but that he may not choose to have these great ears of thine regaled with his matters?'

'Aweel, sir, just as you and he like, so ye see to my business,' said Dandie, not a whit disconcerted by the roughness of this reception. 'We're at the auld wark o' the marches again, Jock o' Dawston Cleugh and me. Ye see we march on the tap o' Touthoprigg after we pass the Pomoragrains; for the Pomoragrains, and Slackenspool, and Bloodylaws, they come in there, and they belang to the Peel; but after ye pass Pomoragrains at a muckle great saucer-headed cutlugged stane, that they ca' Charlie's Chuckie, there Dawston Cleugh and Charlies-hope they march. Now, I say, the march rins on the tap o' the hill where the wind and water shears; but Jock o' Dawston Cleugh again, he contravenes that, and says that it hauds down by the auld drove-road that gaes awa by the Knot o' the Gate ower to Keeldar-ward--and that makes an unco difference.'

'And what difference does it make, friend?' said Pleydell. 'How many sheep will it feed?'

'Ou, no mony,' said Dandie, scratching his head; 'it's lying high and exposed--it may feed a hog, or aiblins twa in a good year.'

'And for this grazing, which may be worth about five shillings a-year, you are willing to throw away a hundred pound or two?'

'Na, sir, it's no for the value of the grass,' replied Dinmont; 'it's for justice.'

Do we at home in Scotland make too much of Scott's life and associations when we think of his poetry and his novels? Possibly few Scotsmen are impartial here. As Dr. Johnson said, they are not a fair people, and when they think of the Waverley Novels they perhaps do not always see quite clearly. Edinburgh and the Eildon Hills, Aberfoyle and Stirling, come between their minds and the printed page:--

A mist of memory broods and floats, The Border waters flow, The air is full of ballad notes Borne out of long ago.

It might be prudent and more critical to take each book on its own merits in a dry light. But it is not easy to think of a great writer thus discreetly. Is Balzac often judged accurately and coldly, piece by piece, here a line and there a line? Are not the best judges those who think of his whole achievement altogether--the whole amazing world of his creation--_La Comédie Humaine_? By the same sort of rule Scott may be judged, and the whole of his work, his vast industry, and all that made the fabric of his life, be allowed to tell on the mind of the reader.

I wish this discourse had been more worthy of its theme, and of this audience, and of this year of heroic memories and lofty hopes. But if, later in the summer, I should find my way back to Ettrick and Yarrow and the Eildon Hills, it will be a pleasure to remember there the honour you have done me in allowing me to speak in Paris, however unworthily, of the greatness of Sir Walter Scott.

Glasgow: Printed at the University Press by Robert MacLehose and Co. Ltd.