Masters of the English Novel Part 5

Love stories are still written in profusion, and we imagine that so compelling a motive for fiction will still be vital (in some one of its innumerable phases) in the twenty-fifth century. Yet it is true that novelists now point with pride to the work of the last generation of their art, in that it has so often made s.e.x love subsidiary to other appeals, or even eliminated it altogether from their books. Some even boast of the fact that not a woman is to be found in the pages of their latest creation. Nearly one hundred years ago, Defoe showed the possibility (if you happen to have genius) of making a powerful story without the introduction of the eternal feminine: Crusoe could not declare with Cyrano de Bergerac:

"Je vous dois d'avoir eu tout au moins, une amie; Grace a vous, une robe a pa.s.se dans ma vie."

It is but natural that, immensely powerful as it is, such a motive should have been over-worked: the gamut of variations has been run from love licit to love illicit, and love degenerate and abnormal to no-love-at-all. But any publisher will a.s.sure you that still "love conquers all"; and in the early nineteenth century any novelist who did not write tales of amatory interest was a fool: the time was not ripe to consider an extension of the theme nor a shifted point of view. For the earlier story-tellers, in the language of Browning's lyric,

"Love is best."

Jane Austen's diction--or better, her style, which is more than diction--in writing her series of social studies, affords a fine example of the adaptation of means to end. Given the work to be accomplished, the tools are perfect instruments for the purpose.

The student of English style in its evolution must marvel at the idiom of Austen, so strangely modern is it, so little has time been able to make it pa.s.se. From her first book, her manner seems to be easy, adequate, unforced, with nothing about it self-conscious or gauche. In the development of some great writers the change from unsureness and vulgarity to the mastery of mature years can be traced: d.i.c.kens is one such. But nothing of the sort can be found in Austen. She has in "Northanger Abbey" and "Pride and Prejudice"--early works--a power in idiomatic English which enables her reader to see her thought through its limpid medium of language, giving, it may be, as little attention to the form of expression as a man uninstructed in the niceties of a woman's dress gives to those details which none the less in their totality produce on him a most formidable effect. Miss Austen's is not the style of startling tricks: nor has she the flashing felicities of a Stevenson which lead one to return to a pa.s.sage for re-gustation. Her manner rarely if ever takes the attention from her matter. But her words and their marshaling (always bearing in her mind her unambitious purpose) make as fit a garment for her thought as was ever devised upon English looms. If this is style, then Jane Austen possesses it, as have very few of the race. There is just a touch of the archaic in it, enough to give a quaintness that has charm without being precious in the French sense; hers are breeding and dignity without distance or stiffness. Now and again the life-likeness is accentuated by a sort of undress which goes to the verge of the slip-shod--as if a gentlewoman should not be too particular, lest she seem professional; the sort of liberty with the starched proprieties of English which Thackeray later took with such delightful results. Of her style as a whole, then, we may say that it is good literature for the very reason that it is not literary; neither mannered nor mincing nor affectedly plain. The style is the woman--and the woman wrote as a lady should who is portraying genteel society; very much as she would talk--with the difference the artist will always make between life and its expression in letters.

Miss Austen's place was won slowly but surely, unlike those authors whose works spring into instantaneous popularity, to be forgotten with equal promptness, or others who like Mrs. Stowe write a book which, for historical reasons, gains immediate vogue and yet retains a certain reputation. The author of "Pride and Prejudice" gains in position with the pa.s.sing of the years.

She is one of the select company of English writers who after a century are really read, really of more than historical significance. New and attractive editions of her books are frequent: she not only holds critical regard (and to criticism her importance is permanent) but is read by an appreciable number of the lovers of sound literature; read far more generally, we feel sure, than Disraeli or Bulwer or Charles Kingsley, who are so much nearer our own day and who filled so large a place in their respective times. Compared with them, Jane Austen appears a serene cla.s.sic. When all is said, the test, the supreme test, is to be read: that means that an author is vitally alive, not dead on the shelves of a library where he has been placed out of deference to the literary Mrs. Grundy.

Lessing felt this when he wrote his brilliant quatrain:

Wer wird nicht einen Klopstock loben, Doch wird ihn jeder lesen? Nein!

Wir wollen weniger erhoben Und fleissiger gelesen sein,

So was the century which was to be conspicuous for its development of fiction that should portray the social relations of contemporary life with fine and ever-increasing truth, most happily inaugurated by a woman who founded its traditions and was a wonderful example of its method. She is the literary G.o.dmother of Trollope and Howells, and of all other novelists since who prefer to the most spectacular uses of the imagination the unsensational chronicling of life.

CHAPTER VI

MODERN ROMANTICISM: SCOTT

The year after the appearance of "Pride and Prejudice" there began to be published in England a series of anonymous historical stories to which the name of Waverley Novels came to be affixed, the t.i.tle of the first volume. It was not until the writer had produced for more than a decade a splendid list of fictions familiar to all lovers of literature, that his name--by that time guessed by many and admitted to some--was publicly announced as that of Walter Scott--a man who, before he had printed a single romance, had won more than national importance by a succession of narrative poems beginning with "The Lay of the Last Minstrel."

Few careers, personal and professional, in letters, are more stimulating and attractive than that of Scott. His life was winsome, his work of that large and n.o.ble order that implies a worthy personality behind it. Scott, the man, as he is portrayed in Lockhart's Life and the ever-delightful Letters, is as suitable an object of admiration as Scott the author of "Guy Mannering" and "Old Mortality." And when we reflect that by the might of his genius he set his seal on the historical romance, that the modern romance derives from Scott, and that, moreover, in spite of the remarkable achievements in this order of fiction during almost a century, he remains not only its founder but its chief ornament, his contribution to modern fiction begins to be appreciated.

The characteristics of the Novel proper as a specific kind of fiction have been already indicated and ill.u.s.trated in this study: we have seen that it is a picture of real life in a setting of to-day: the romance, which is Scott's business, is distinguished from this in its use of past time and historic personages, its heightening of effect by the introducing of the exceptional in scene and character, its general higher color in the conductment of the narrative: and above all, its emphasis upon the larger, n.o.bler, more inspiring aspects of humanity.

This, be it understood, is the romance of modern times, not the elder romance which was irresponsible in its picture of life, falsely idealistic. When Sir Walter began his fiction, the trend of the English Novel inheriting the method and purpose of Richardson, was away from the romantic in this sense. The a.n.a.lysis given has, it may be hoped, made this plain. It was by the sheer force of his creative gift, therefore, that Scott set the fashion for the romance in fiction: aided though he doubtless was by the general romanticism introduced by the greater English poets and expressive of the movement in literature towards freedom, which followed the French Revolution. That Scott at this time gave the fiction an impulse not in the central flow of development is shown in the fact of its rapid decadence after he pa.s.sed away. While the romance is thus a different thing from the Novel, modern fiction is close woven of the two strands of realism and romance, and a comprehensive study must have both in mind. Even authors like d.i.c.kens, Thackeray and Eliot, who are to be regarded as stalwart realists, could not avoid a single sally each into romance, with "A Tale of Two Cities," "Henry Osmond" and "Romola"; and on the other hand, romanticists like Hawthorne and Stevenson have used the methods and manner of the realist, giving their loftiest flights the most solid groundwork of psychologic reality. It must always be borne in mind that there is a romantic way of dealing with fact: that a novel of contemporary society which implies its more exceptional possibilities and gives due regard to the symbol behind every so-called fact, can be, in a good sense, romantic. Surely, that is a more acceptable use of the realistic formula which, by the exercise of an imaginative grasp of history, makes alive and veritable for us some hitherto unrealized person or by-gone epoch. Scott is thus a romanticist because he gave the romantic implications of reality: and is a novelist in that broader, better definition of the word which admits it to be the novelist's business to portray social humanity, past or present, by means of a unified, progressive prose narrative. Scott, although he takes advantage of the romancer's privilege of a free use of the historic past, the presentation of its heroic episodes and spectacular events, is a novelist, after all, because he deals with the recognizably human, not with the grotesque, supernatural, impossible. He imparts a vivid sense of the social interrelations, for the most part in a medieval environment, but in any case in an environment which one recognizes as controlled by human laws; not the brain-freak of a pseudo-idealist. Scott's Novels, judged broadly, make an impression of unity, movement and climax. To put it tersely: he painted manners, interpreted character in an historic setting and furnished story for story's sake. Nor was his genius helpless without the historic prop. Certain of his major successes are hardly historical narratives at all; the scene of "Guy Mannering," for example, and of "The Antiquary,"

is laid in a time but little before that which was known personally to the romancer in his young manhood.

It will be seen in this theory of realism and romance that so far from antagonists are the story of truth and the story of poetry, they merely stand for diverging preferences in handling material. n.o.body has stated this distinction better than America's greatest romancer, Nathaniel Hawthorne. Having "The House of the Seven Gables" in mind, he says:

When a writer calls his work a romance, it need hardly be observed that he wishes to claim a certain lat.i.tude both as to its fashion and material, which he would not have felt himself ent.i.tled to a.s.sume, had he professed to be writing a novel. The latter form of composition is presumed to aim at a very minute fidelity, not only to the possible, but to the probable and ordinary course of man's experience. The former, while as a work of art it must rigidly subject itself to laws and while it sins unpardonably so far as it may swerve aside from the truth of the human heart, has fairly a right to present that truth under circ.u.mstances to a great extent of the author's own choosing or creation. If he think fit, also, he may so manage his atmospherical medium as to bring out or mellow the lights and deepen and enrich the shadows of the picture. He will be wise, no doubt, to make a very moderate use of the privileges here stated, and, especially, to mingle the marvelous rather as a slight, delicate and evanescent flavor than as any portion of the actual substance of the dish offered to the public. The point of view in which this tale comes under the romantic definition lies in the attempt to connect a by-gone time with the very present that is flitting away from us. It is a legend, prolonging itself from an epoch now gray in the distance, down into our own broad daylight, and bringing along with it some of its legendary mist, which the reader may either disregard or allow it to float almost imperceptibly about the characters and events for the sake of a picturesque effect. The narrative, it may be, is woven of so humble a texture, as to require this advantage and at the same time to render it the more difficult of attainment.

These words may be taken as the modern announcement of Romance, as distinguished from that of elder times.

The many romantic Novels written by Scott can be separated into two groups, marked by a cleavage of time: the year being 1819, the date of the publication of "Ivanhoe." In the earlier group, containing the fiction which appeared during the five years from 1814 to 1819, we find world-welcomed masterpieces which are an expression of the unforced first fruits of his genius: the three series of "Tales of My Landlord," "Guy Mannering," "Rob Roy,"

"The Heart of Midlothian" and "Old Mortality," to mention the most conspicuous. To the second division belong stories equally well known, many of them impressive: "The Monastery,"

"Kenilworth," "Quentin Durward," and "Red Gauntlet" among them, but as a whole marking a falling off of power as increasing years and killing cares made what was at first hardly more than a sportive effort, a burden under which a man, at last broken, staggered toward the desired goal. There is no manlier, more gallant spectacle offered in the annals of literature than this of Walter Scott, silent partner in a publishing house and ruined by its failure after he has set up country gentleman and gratified his expensive taste for baronial life, as he buckles to, and for weary years strives to pay off by the product of his pen the obligations incurred; his executors were able to clear his estate of debt. It was an immense drudgery (with all allowance for its moments of creative joy) accomplished with high spirits and a kind of French gayety. Nor, though the best quality of the work was injured towards the end of the long task, and Scott died too soon at sixty-one, was the born raconteur in him choked by this grim necessity of grind. There have been in modern fiction a few masters, and but a few, who were natural improvisatori: conspicuous among them are Dumas the elder and Walter Scott. Such writers pour forth from a very spring of effortless power invention after invention, born of the impulse of a rich imagination, a mind stored with bountiful material for such shaping, and a nature soaked with the humanities. They are great lovers of life, great personalities, gifted, resourceful, unstinted in their giving, ever with something of the boy in them, the careless prodigals of literature. Often it seems as if they toiled not to acquire the craft of the writer, nor do they lose time over the labor of the file. To the end, they seem in a way like glorious amateurs.

They are at the antipodes of those careful craftsmen with whom all is forethought, plan and revision. Scott, fired by a period, a character or scene, commonly sat down without seeing his way through and wrote currente calamo, letting creation take care of its own. The description of him by a contemporary is familiar where he was observed at a window, reeling off the ma.n.u.script sheets of his first romance.

Since we sat down I have been watching that confounded hand--it fascinates my eye. It never stops--page after page is finished and thrown on the heap of ma.n.u.script, and still it goes on unwearied--and so it will be until candles are brought in, and G.o.d knows how long after that. It is the same every night.

The great merits of such a nature and the method that is its outcome should not blind us to its dangers, some of which Scott did not escape. Schoolboys to-day are able to point out defects in his style, glibly talking of loosely-built sentences, redundancies, diffuseness, or what not. He seems long-winded to the rising generation, and it may be said in their defense that there are Novels of Scott which if cut down one-third would be improved. Critics, too, speak of his anachronisms, his huddled endings, the stiffness of his young gentleman heroes, his apparent indifference to the laws of good construction; as well as of his Tory limitations, the ponderosity of his manner and the unmodernness of his outlook on the world along with the simple superficiality of his psychology. All this may cheerfully be granted, and yet the Scott lover will stoutly maintain that the spirit and the truth are here, that the Waverley books possess the great elements of fiction-making: not without reason did they charm Europe as well as the English-speaking lands for twenty years. The Scott romances will always be mentioned, with the work of Burns, Carlyle and Stevenson, when Scotland's contribution to English letters is under discussion; his position is fortified as he recedes into the past, which so soon engulfs lesser men. And it is because he was one of the world's natural storytellers: his career is an impressive object-lesson for those who would elevate technique above all else.

He produced romances which dealt with English history centuries before his own day, or with periods near his time: Scotch romances of like kind which had to do with the historic past of his native land: romances of humbler life and less stately entourage, the scenes of which were laid nearer, sometimes almost within his own day. He was, in instances, notably successful in all these kinds, but perhaps most of all in the stories falling in the two categories last-named: which, like "Old Mortality," have the full flavor of Scotch soil.

The nature of the Novels he was to produce became evident with the first of them all, "Waverley." Here is a border tale which narrates the adventures of a scion of that house among the loyal Highlanders temporarily a rebel to the reigning English sovereign and a recruit in the interests of the young pretender: his fortunes, in love and war, and his eventual reinstatement in the King's service and happiness with the woman of his choice.

While it might be too sweeping to say that there was in this first romance (which has never ranked with his best) the whole secret of the Scott historical story, it is true that the book is typical, that here as in the long line of brilliantly envisaged chronicle histories that followed, some of them far superior to this initial attempt, are to be found the characteristic method and charm of Sir Walter. Here, as elsewhere, the reader is offered picturesque color, ever varied scenes, striking situations, salient characters and a certain n.o.bility both of theme and manner that comes from the accustomed representation of life in which large issues of family and state are involved--the whole merged in a mood of fealty and love. You constantly feel in Scott that life "means intensely and means good." A certain amount of lovable partisanship and prejudice goes with the view, not un-welcomely; there is also some carelessness as to the minute details of fact. But the effect of truth, both in character and setting, is overwhelming. Scott has vivified English and Scotch history more than all the history books: he saw it himself--so we see it. One of the reasons his work rings true--whereas Mrs. Radcliffe's adventure tales seem fict.i.tious as well as feeble--is because it is the natural outcome of his life: all his interest, his liking, his belief went into the Novels. When he sat down at the mature age of forty-three to make fiction, there was behind him the large part of a lifetime of unconscious preparation for what he had to do: for years he had been steeped in the folk-lore and legend of his native country; its local history had been his hobby; he had not only read its humbler literature but wandered widely among its people, absorbed its language and its life, felt "the very pulse of the machine." Hence he differed toto caelo from an archeologist turned romancer like the German Ebers: being rather a genial traveler who, after telling tales of his experiences by word of mouth at the tavern hearth, sets them down upon paper for better preservation. He had been no less student than pedestrian in the field; lame as he was, he had footed his way to many a tall memorial of a h.o.a.ry past, and when still hardly more than a boy, burrowed among the ma.n.u.scripts of the Advocates' Library in Edinburgh, making himself an able antiquary at a time when most youth are idling or philandering.

Moreover, he was himself the son of a border chief and knew minstrelsy almost at his nurse's knee: and the lilt of a ballad was always like wine to his heart. It makes you think of Sir Philip Sidney's splendid testimony to such an influence: "I never heard the old song of Percy and Douglas that I found not my heart moved more than with a trumpet."

All this could not but tell; the incidents in a book like "Waverley" are unforced: the advance of the story closely imitates Life in its ever-shifting succession of events: the reader soon learns to trust the author's faculty of invention.

Plot, story-interest, is it not the backbone of romantic fiction? And Scott, though perchance he may not conduct it so swiftly as pleases the modern taste, may be relied on to furnish it.

In the earlier period up to "Ivanhoe," that famous sortie into English history, belong such masterpieces as "Guy Mannering,"

"Old Mortality," "Heart of Midlothian," "The Bride of Lammermoor," and "Rob Roy"; a list which, had he produced nothing else would have sufficed to place him high among the makers of romance. It is not the intention to a.n.a.lyze these great books one by one--a task more fit for a volume than a chapter; but to bring out those qualities of his work which are responsible for his place in fiction and influence in the Novel of the nineteenth century.

No story of this group--nor of his career as a writer--has won more plaudits than "The Heart of Midlothian." Indeed, were the reader forced to the unpleasant necessity of choosing out of the thirty stories which Scott left the world the one most deserving of the prize, possibly the choice would fall on that superb portrayal of Scotch life--although other fine Novels of the quintet named would have their loyal friends. To study the peerlessly pathetic tale of Effie and Jeanie Deans is to see Scott at his representative best and note the headmarks of his genius: it is safe to say that he who finds nothing in it can never care for its author.

The first thing to notice in this novel of the ancient Edinburgh Tolbooth, this romance of faithful sisterhood, is its essential Scotch fiber. The fact affects the whole work. It becomes thereby simpler, homelier, more vernacular: it is a story that is a native emanation. The groundwork of plot too is simple, vital: and moreover, founded on a true incident. Effie, the younger of two sisters, is betrayed; concerning her betrayer there is mystery: she is supposed to commit child-murder to hide her shame: a crime then punishable by death. The story deals with her trial, condemnation and final pardon and happy marriage with her lover through the n.o.ble mediation of Jeanie, her elder sister.

In the presentation of an earlier period in Scotland, the opening of the eighteenth century, when all punitive measures were primitive and the lawless social elements seethed with restless discontent, Scott had a fine chance: and at the very opening, in describing the violent putting to death of Captain Porteous, he skilfully prepares the way for the general picture to be given. Then, as the story progresses, to the supreme sacrificial effort of Jeanie in behalf of her erring sister's life, gradually, stroke upon stroke, the period with its religious schisms, its political pa.s.sions and strong family ties, is so illuminated that while the interest is centered upon the Deans and their homely yet tragic history, Scotch life in an earlier century is envisaged broadly, truthfully, in a way never to grow pale in memory. Cameraman or King's man, G.o.d-fearing peasant, lawless ruffian or Tory gentleman, the characters are so marshaled that without sides being taken by the writer, one feels the complexity of the period: and its uncivil wildness is dramatically conveyed as a central fact in the Tolbooth with its grim concomitants of gallows and gaping crowd of sightseers and malcontents.

Scott's feeling for dramatic situation is ill.u.s.trated in several scenes that stand out in high relief after a hundred details have been forgotten: one such is the trial scene in which Effie implores her sister to save her by a lie, and Jeanie in agony refuses; the whole management of it is impressively pictorial.

Another is that where Jeanie, on the road to London, is detained by the little band of gypsy-thieves and pa.s.ses the night with Madge Wildfire in the barn: it is a scene Scott much relishes and makes his reader enjoy. And yet another, and greater, is that meeting with Queen Caroline and Lady Suffolk when the humble Scotch girl is conducted by the Duke of Argyll to the country house and in the garden beseeches pardon for her sister Effie. It is intensely picturesque, real with many homely touches which add to the truth without cheapening the effect of royalty. The gradual working out of the excellent plot of this romance to a conclusion pleasing to the reader is a favorable specimen of this romancer's method in story-telling. There is disproportion in the movement: it is slow in the first part, drawing together in texture and gaining in speed during its closing portion. Scott does not hesitate here, as so often, to interrupt the story in order to interpolate historical information, instead of interweaving it atmospherically with the tale itself. When Jeanie is to have her interview with the Duke of Argyll, certain preliminary pages must be devoted to a sketch of his career. A master of plot and construction to-day would have made the same story, so telling in motive, so vibrant with human interest, more effective, so far as its conductment is concerned. Scott in his fiction felt it as part of his duty to furnish chronicle-history, very much as Shakspere seems to have done in his so-called chronicle-history plays; whereas at present the skilled artist feels no such responsibility. It may be questioned if the book's famous scenes--the attempted breaking into the Tolbooth, or the visit of Jeanie to the Queen--would not have gained greatly from a dramatic point of view had they been more condensed; they are badly languaged, looking to this result, not swift enough for the best effects of drama, whereas conception and framework are highly dramatic. In a word, if more carefully written, fuller justice would have been done the superb theme.

The characters that crowd the novel (as, in truth, they teem throughout the great romances) testify to his range and grasp: the Dean family, naturally, in the center. The pious, st.u.r.dy Cameronian father and the two clearly contrasted sisters: Butler, the clergyman lover; the saddle-maker, Saddletree, for an amusing, long-winded bore; the quaint Laird Dumbledikes; the soldiers of fortune, George Wilson and his mate; that other soldier, Porteous; the gang of evildoers with Madge in the van--a wonderful creation, she, only surpa.s.sed by the better known Meg--the high personages cl.u.s.tered about the Queen: loquacious Mrs. Gla.s.s, the Dean's kinswoman--one has to go back to Chaucer or Shakspere for a companion picture so firmly painted in and composed on such a generous scale.

Contention arises in a discussion of a mortal so good as Jeanie: it would hardly be in the artistic temper of our time to draw a peasant girl so well-nigh superhuman in her traits; Balzac's "Eugenie Grandet" (the book appeared only fifteen years later), is much nearer our time in its conception of the possibilities of human nature: Eugenie does not strain credence, while Jeanie's pious tone at times seems out of character, if not out of humanity. The striking contrast with Effie is in a way to her advantage: the weaker damsel appears more natural, more like flesh and blood. But the final scene when, after fleeing with her high-born lover, she returns to her simple sister as a wife in a higher grade of society and the sister agrees that their ways henceforth must be apart--that scene for truth and power is one of the master-strokes. The reader finds that Jeanie Deans somehow grows steadily in his belief and affection: quietly but surely, a sense of her comeliness, her truthful love, her quaint touch of Scotch canniness, her daughterly duteousness and her stanch principle intensifies until it is a pang to bid her farewell, and the mind harks back to her with a fond recollection. Take her for all in all, Jeanie Deans ranks high in Scott's female portraiture: with Meg Merillies in her own station, and with Lucy Ashton and Di Vernon among those of higher social place. In her cla.s.s she is perhaps unparalleled in all his fiction. The whole treatment of Effie's irregular love is a fine example of Scott's kindly tolerance (tempered to a certain extent by the social convention of his time) in dealing with the sins of human beings. He is plainly glad to leave Effie an honestly married woman with the right to look forward to happy, useful years. The story breeds generous thoughts on the theme of young womanhood: it handled the problem neither from the superior alt.i.tude of the conventional moralist nor the cold aloofness of the latter-day realist--Flaubert's att.i.tude in "Madame Bovary."

"A big, imperfect, n.o.ble Novel," the thoughtful reader concludes as he closes it, and thinking back to an earlier impression, finds that time has not loosened its hold.

And to repeat the previous statement: what is true of this is true of all Scott's romances. The theme varies, the setting with its wealth of local color may change, the period or party differ with the demands of fact. Scotch and English history are widely invoked: now it is the time of the Georges, now of the Stuarts, now Elizabethan, again back to the Crusades. Scott, in fact, ranges from Rufus the Red to the year 1800, and many are the complications he considers within that ample sweep. It would be untrue to say that his plots imitate each other or lack in invention: we have seen that invention is one of his virtues.

Nevertheless, the motives are few when disenc.u.mbered of their stately historical trappings: hunger, ambition, love, hate, patriotism, religion, the primary pa.s.sions and bosom interests of mankind are those he depicts, because they are universal. It is his gift for giving them a particular dress in romance after romance which makes the result so often satisfactory, even splendid. Yet, despite the range of time and grasp of Life's essentials, there is in Scott's interpretation of humanity a certain lack which one feels in comparing him with the finest modern masters: with a Meredith, a Turgeneff or a Balzac. It is a difference not only of viewpoint but of synthetic comprehension and philosophic penetration. It means that he mirrored a day less complex, less subtle and thoughtful. This may be dwelt upon and ill.u.s.trated a little in some further considerations on his main qualities.

Scott, like the earlier novelists in general, was content to depict character from without rather than from within: to display it through act and scene instead of by the probing a.n.a.lysis so characteristically modern. This meant inevitable limitations in dealing with an historical character or time. A high-church Tory himself, a frank Jacobite in his leanings--Taine declared he had a feudal mind--he naturally so composed a picture as to reflect this predilection, making effects of picturesqueness accordingly. The idea given of Mary Queen of Scots from "The Abbot" is one example of what is meant; that of Prince Charley in "Waverley" is another. In a sense, however, the stories are all the better for this obvious bias. Where a masculine imagination moved by warm affection seizes on an historic figure the result is sure to be vivid, at least; and let it be repeated that Scott has in this way re-created history for the many. He shows a sound artistic instinct in his handling of historic personages relative to those imaginary: rarely letting them occupy the center of interest, but giving that place to the creatures of his fancy, thereby avoiding the hampering restriction of a too close following of fact. The manipulation of Richard Coeur de Lion in "Ivanhoe" is instructive with this in mind.

While the lights and shadows of human life are duly blended in his romances, Scott had a preference for the delineation of the gentle, the grand (or grandiose), the n.o.ble and the beautiful: loving the medieval, desiring to reproduce the age of chivalry, he was naturally aristocratic in taste, as in intellect, though democratic by the dictates of a thoroughly good heart. He liked a pleasant ending--or, at least, believed in mitigating tragedy by a checker of sunlight at the close. He had little use for the degenerate types of mankind: certainly none for degeneracy for its own sake, or because of a kind of scientific interest in its workings. Nor did he conceive of the mission of fiction as being primarily instructional: nor set too high a value on a novel as a lesson in life--although at times (read the moral tag to "The Heart of Midlothian") he speaks in quite the preacher's tone of the improvement to be got from the teaching of the tale. Critics to-day are, I think, inclined to place undue emphasis upon what they regard as Scott's failure to take the moral obligations of fiction seriously: they confuse his preaching and his practice.

Whatever he declared in his letters or Journal, the novels themselves, read in the light of current methods, certainly leave an old-fashioned taste on the palate, because of their moralizings and avowments of didactic purpose. The advantages and disadvantages of this general att.i.tude can be easily understood: the loss in philosophic grasp is made up in healthiness of tone and pleasantness of appeal. One recognizes such an author as, above all, human and hearty. The reserves and delicacies of Anglo-Saxon fiction are here, of course, in full force: and a doctored view of the Middle Ages is the result, as it is in Tennyson's "Idylls of the King." A sufficient answer is that it is not Scott's business to set us right as to medievalism, but rather to use it for the imaginative purposes of pleasure. The frank intrusion of the author himself into the body of the page o in the way of footnotes is also disturbing, judged by our later standards: but was carried on with much charm by Thackeray in the mid-century, to reappear at its end in the pages of Du Maurier.

In the more technical qualifications of the story-maker's art, Scott compensated in the more masculine virtues for what he lacked in the feminine. Possessing less of finesse, subtlety and painstaking than some who were to come, he excelled in sweep, movement and variety, as well as in a kind of largeness of effect: "the big bow-wow business," to use his own humorously descriptive phrase when he was comparing himself with Jane Austen, to his own disadvantage. And it is these very qualities that endear him to the general and keep his memories green; making "Ivanhoe" and "Kenilworth" still useful for school texts--unhappy fate! Still, this means that he always had a story to tell and told it with the flow and fervor and the instinctive coherence of the story-teller born, not made.

When the fortunes of his fictive folk were settled, this novelist, always more interested in characters than in the plot which must conduct them, often loses interest and his books end more or less lamely, or with obvious conventionality. Anything to close it up, you feel. But of action and incident, scenes that live and situations with stage value, one of Scott's typical fictions has enough to furnish the stock in trade for life of many later-day romanticists who feebly follow in his wake. He has a special skill in connecting the comparatively small private involvement, which is the kernel of a story, with important public matters, so that they seem part of the larger movements or historic occurrences of the world. Dignity and body are gained for the tale thereby.

In the all-important matter of characterization, Scott yields the palm to very few modern masters. Merely to think of the range, variety and actuality of his creations is to feel the blood move quicker. From figures of historic and regal importance--Richard, Elizabeth, Mary--to the pure coinage of imagination--Dandy Dinmont, Dugald Dalgetty, Dominie Sampson, Rebecca, Lucy, Di Vernon and Jeanie--how the names begin to throng and what a motley yet welcome company is a.s.sembled in the a.s.sizes where this romancer sits to mete out fate to those within the wide bailiwick of his imagination! This central gift he possessed with the princes of story-making. It is also probable that of the imaginative writers of English speech, n.o.body but Shakspere and d.i.c.kens--and d.i.c.kens alone among fellow fiction-makers--has enriched the workaday world with so many people, men and women, whose speech, doings and fates are familiar and matter for common reference. And this is the gift of gifts. It is sometimes said that Scott's heroes and heroines (especially, perhaps, the former) are lay figures, not convincing, vital creations. There is a touch of truth in it.

His striking and successful figures are not walking gentlemen and leading ladies. When, for example, you recall "Guy Mannering," you do not think of the young gentleman of that name, but of Meg Merillies as she stands in the night in high relief on a bank, weather-beaten of face and wild of dress, hurling her anathema: "Ride your ways, Ellangowan!" In characters rather of humble pathos like Jeanie Deans or of eccentric humor like Dominie Sampson, Scott is at his best. He confessed to mis-liking his heroes and only warming up to full creative activity over his more unconventional types: border chiefs, buccaneers, freebooters and smugglers. "My rogue always, in spite of me, turns out my hero," is his whimsical complaint.

But this does not apply in full force to his women. Di Vernon--who does not recall that scene where from horseback in the moonlight she bends to her lover, parting from him with the words: "Farewell, Frank, forever! There is a gulf between us--a gulf of absolute perdition. Where we go, you must not follow; what we do, you must not share in--farewell, be happy!" That is the very accent of Romance, in its true and proper setting: not to be staled by time nor custom.