The chapter has already stretched to nearly the utmost proportions compatible with the scale of this little book, and we must not indulge in very many critical remarks on the general character of the compositions discussed in it. But I have never carried out the plan (which I think indispensable) of reading over again whatever work, however well known, one has to write about, with more satisfaction. The main defects lie on the surface. Despite great felicities of a certain kind, these poems have no claim to formal perfection, and occasionally sin by very great carelessness, if not by something worse. The poet frankly shows himself as one whose appeal is not that of "jewels five words long," set and arranged in phrases of that magical and unending beauty which the very greatest poets of the world command. His effect, even in description, is rather of ma.s.s than of detail. He does not attempt a.n.a.lysis in character, and only skirts pa.s.sion. Although prodigal enough of incident, he is very careless of connected plot. But his great and abiding glory is that he revived the art, lost for centuries in England, of telling an interesting story in verse, of riveting the attention through thousands of lines of poetry neither didactic nor argumentative. And of his separate pa.s.sages, his patches of description and incident, when the worst has been said of them, it will remain true that, in their own way and for their own purpose, they cannot be surpa.s.sed. The already noticed comparison of any of Scott"s best verse-tales with _Christabel_, which they formally imitated to some extent, and with the _White Doe of Rylstone_, which followed them, will no doubt show that Coleridge and Wordsworth had access to mansions in the house of poetry where Scott is never seen. But in some respects even their best pa.s.sages are not superior to his; and as tales, as romances, his are altogether superior to theirs.
FOOTNOTES:
[12] It is fair to him to say that he made no public complaints, and that when some gutter-scribbler in 1810 made charges of plagiarism from him against Scott, he furnished Southey with the means of clearing him from all share in the matter (_Lockhart_, iii. 293; Southey"s _Life and Correspondence_, iii. 291). But there is a suspicion of fretfulness even in the Preface to _Christabel_; and the references to Scott"s poetry (not to himself) in the _Table Talk_, etc., are almost uniformly disparaging. It is true that these last are not strictly evidence.
[13] The objection taken to this word by precisians seems to ignore a useful distinction. The _antiquary_ is a collector; the _antiquarian_ a student or writer. The same person may be both; but he may not.
[14] _Waverley_, chap. vi. It owes a little to Smollett"s Introduction to _Humphry Clinker_, but as usual improves the loan greatly.
[15] Inasmuch as he himself was secretary to the Commission which did away with it.
[16] Taken from the name of his friend Morritt"s place on the Greta.
CHAPTER IV
THE NOVELS, FROM _WAVERLEY_ TO _REDGAUNTLET_
In the opening introduction to the collected edition of the novels, Scott has given a very full account of the genesis of _Waverley_. These introductions, written before the final inroad had been made on his powers by the united strength of physical and moral misfortune, animated at once by the last glow of those powers, and by the indefinable charm of a fond retrospection, displaying every faculty in autumn luxuriance, are so delightful that they sometimes seem to be the very cream and essence of his literary work in prose. Indeed, I have always wondered why they have not been published separately as a History of the Waverley Novels by their author. Yet the public, I believe, with what I fear must be called its usual lack of judgment in some such matters, seems never to have read them very widely. An exception, however, may possibly have been made in the case of this first one, opening as it has long done every new issue of the whole set of novels. At anyrate, in one way or another, it is probably known, at least to those who take an interest in Scott, that he had begun _Waverley_ and thrown it aside some ten years before its actual appearance, at a time when he was yet a novice in literature. He had also attempted one or two other things,--a completion of Strutt"s _Queenhoo Hall_, the beginning of a tale about Thomas the Rhymer, etc., which are now appended to the introduction itself,--and he had once, in 1810, resumed _Waverley_, and again thrown it aside. At last, when his supremacy as a popular poet was threatened by Byron, and when, perhaps, he himself was a little wearying of the verse tale, he discovered the fragment while searching for fishing-tackle in the old desk where he had put it, and after a time resolved to make a new and anonymous attempt on public favour.
By the time--1814--when the book actually appeared, considerable changes, both for good and for bad, had occurred in Scott"s circ.u.mstances; and the total of his literary work, independently of the poems mentioned in the last chapter, had been a good deal increased.
Ashestiel had been exchanged for Abbotsford; the new house was being planned and carried out so as to become, if not exactly a palace, something much more than the cottage which had been first talked of; and the owner"s pa.s.sion for buying, at extravagant prices, every neighbouring patch of mostly thankless soil that he could get hold of was growing by indulgence. He himself, in 1811 and the following years, was extremely happy and extremely busy, planting trees, planning rooms, working away at _Rokeby_ and _Triermain_ in the general sitting-room of the makeshift house, with hammering all about him (now, the hammer and the pen are perhaps of all manual implements the most deadly and irreconcilable foes!), corresponding with all sorts and conditions of men; furnishing introductions and contributions (in some cases never yet collected) to all sorts and conditions of books, and struggling, as best he saw his way, though the way was unfortunately not the right one, with the ever-increasing difficulties of Ballantyne & Company. I forget whether there is any evidence that d.i.c.kens consciously took his humorous incarnation of the duties of a "Co." from Scott"s own experience. But Scott as certainly had to provide the money, the sense, the good-humour, and the rest of the working capital as Mark Tapley himself. The merely pecuniary part of these matters may be left to the next chapter; it is sufficient to say that, aggravated by misjudgment in the selection and carrying out of the literary part, it brought the firm in 1814 exceedingly near the complete smash which actually happened ten years later. One is tempted to wish that the crash had come, for it was only averted by the alliance with Constable which was the cause of the final downfall. Also, it would have come at a time when Scott was physically better able to bear it; it could hardly in any degree have interfered with the appearance of _Waverley_ and its followers; and it would have had at least a chance of awakening their author to a sense of the double mistake of engaging his credit in directly commercial concerns, and of sinking his money in land and building. However, things were to be as they were, and not otherwise.
How anxious Constable must have been to recover Scott (Hunter, the stone of stumbling, was now removed by death) is evident from the mere list of the t.i.tles of the books which he took over in whole or part from the Ballantynes. Even his Napoleonic audacity quailed before the _Edinburgh Annual Register_, with its handsome annual loss of a thousand a year, at Brewster"s _Persian Astronomy_, in 4to and 8vo, and at _General Views of the County of Dumfries_. But he saddled himself with a good deal of the "stock" (which in this case most certainly had not its old sense of "a.s.sets"), and in May 1813, Scott seems to have thought that if John Ballantyne would curb his taste for long-dated bills, things might go well. Unluckily, John did not choose to do so, and Scott, despite the warning, was equally unable to curb his own for peat-bogs, marl-pits, the Cauldshiels Loch, and splendid lots of ancient armour. By July there was again trouble, and in August things were so bad that they were only cleared by Scott"s obtaining from the Duke of Buccleuch a guarantee for 4000. It was in consenting to this that the Duke expressed his approval of Scott"s determination to refuse the Laureateship, which had been offered to him, and which, in consequence of his refusal and at his suggestion, was conferred upon Southey. Even the guarantee, though it did save the firm, saved it with great difficulty.
In the following winter Scott had an adventure with his eccentric German amanuensis, Henry Weber, who had for some time been going mad, and who proposed a duel with pistols (which he produced) to his employer in the study at Castle Street. _Swift_ appeared at last in the summer, and it was in June 1814 that the first of a series of wonderful _tours de force_ was achieved by the completion, in about three weeks, of the last half of _Waverley_. One of the most striking things in Lockhart is the story of the idle apprentice who became industrious by seeing Scott"s hand traversing the paper hour after hour at his study window. The novel actually appeared on July 7, and, being anonymous, made no immediate "move," as booksellers say, before Scott set off a fortnight later for his long-planned tour with the Commissioners of Northern Lights--the Scottish Trinity House--in their yacht, round the northern half of the island and to Orkney and Shetland. To abstract his own admirable account of the tour[27] would be a task grateful neither to writer nor to reader, the latter of whom, if he does not know it already, had better lose no time in making its acquaintance. On the return in September, Scott was met by two pieces of bad and good tidings respectively--the death of the d.u.c.h.ess of Buccleuch, and the distinct, though not as yet "furious," success of his novel.
There is no doubt that the early fragments in tale-telling which have been noticed above do not display any particular skill in the art; nor is there much need to quarrel with those who declare that the opening of _Waverley_[26] itself ranks little, if at all, above them. I always read it myself; but I believe most people plunge almost at once into the Tullyveolan visit. By doing so, however, they miss not merely the critical pleasure of comparing a man"s work (as can rarely be done) during his period of groping for the way, with his actual stumble into it for the first time, but also such justification as there is for the hero"s figure. n.o.body ever judged the unlucky captain of Gardiner"s better than his creator, who at the time frankly called him "a sneaking piece of imbecility," and avowed, with as much probability as right, that "if he had married Flora, she would have set him up on the chimney-piece, as Count Borowlaski"s[25] wife used to do." But his weaknesses have at least an excuse from his education and antecedents, which does not appear if these antecedents are neglected.
Still, the story-interest only begins when Waverley rides into the bear-warded avenue; it certainly never ceases till the golden image of the same totem is replaced in the Baron of Bradwardine"s hand. And it is very particularly to be observed that this interest is of a kind absolutely novel in combination and idiosyncrasy. The elements of literary interest are nowhere new, except in what is, for aught we know, accidentally the earliest literature _to us_. They are all to be found in Homer, in the Book of Job, in the _Agamemnon_, in the _Lancelot_, in the _Poem of the Cid_. But from time to time, in the hands of the men of greater genius, they are shaken up afresh, they receive new adjustments, and a touch of something personal which transforms them. This new adjustment and touch produced in Scott"s case what we call the Historical Novel.[24] It is quite a mistake to think that he was limited to this. _Guy Mannering_ and _The Antiquary_ among the earlier novels, _St. Ronan"s Well_ and the exquisite introductory sketch to the _Chronicles of the Canongate_ among the later, would disprove that. But the historical novel was the new kind that he was "born to introduce,"
after many failures in many generations. It is difficult to say whether it was accident or property which made his success in it co-existent with his success in depicting national character, scenery, and manners.
Attempts at this, not always unsuccessful attempts, had indeed been made before. It had been tried frequently, though usually in the sense of caricature, on the stage; it had been done quite recently in the novel by Miss Edgeworth (whom Scott at least professed to regard as his governess here), and much earlier in this very department of Scotch matters by Smollett. But it had never been done with really commanding ability on the great scale.
In _Waverley_ Scott supplied these two aspects, the historical-romantic and the national-characteristic, with a felicity perhaps all the more unerring in that it seems to have been only partly conscious. The subject of "the Forty-five" was now fully out of taboo, and yet retained an interest more than antiquarian. The author had the amplest stores of knowledge, and that sympathy which is so invaluable to the artist when he keeps it within the limits of art. He seems to have possessed by instinct (for there was n.o.body to teach him) the paramount secret of the historical novelist, the secret of making his central and prominent characters fict.i.tious, and the real ones mostly subsidiary. On the other hand, the knowledge of his native country, which he had been acc.u.mulating for almost the whole of his nearly four-and-forty years of life, was joined in him with that universal knowledge of humanity which only men of the greatest genius have. I am, indeed, aware that both these positions have been attacked. I was much pleased, some time after I had begun to write this little book, to find in a review of the present year of grace these words: "Scott only knew a small portion of human nature, and he was unable to portray the physiognomy of the past."
I feared at first that this might be only one of the numerous flings of our young barbarians, a pleasant, or pleasantly intended, flirt of the heels of the New Humour. But the context showed that the writer was in deadly earnest. I shall not attempt here to explain to him, in a popular or any other style, that he is, perhaps, not quite right. Life itself is not long enough--"little books" are decidedly too short--for a demonstration that the Pacific Ocean is not really a small portion of the terrestrial water-s.p.a.ce, or that Alexander was able to overrun foreign countries. We may find a little room in the Conclusion to say something more about Scott"s range and his faculty. Here it will be enough to wear our friend"s rue with a slight difference, and to say that _Waverley_ and its successors showed in their author knowledge, complete in all but certain small parts, of human nature, and an almost unlimited faculty of portraying the physiognomy of the past.
It was scarcely to be expected that a book which was anonymous, and of which only a very few persons knew the real authorship, while even those who guessed it at all early were not so very many, should attain immediate popularity. Lockhart says that the slowness of the success was exaggerated, but his own figures prove that it was somewhat leisurely.
Five editions, one (the second) of two thousand, the others of one thousand each, supplied the demand of the first six months, and a thousand copies more that of the next eighteen months--a difference from the almost instantaneous myriads of the poems, quite sufficient to show very eloquently how low the prose novel then stood in popular favour. It is the greatest triumph of Scott, from this low point of view, that his repeated blows heated the public as they did, till at the fourth publication, within but a year or two, Constable actually dared to start with ten thousand copies at once, and they were all absorbed in no time.
Scott had always been a rapid worker, but it was only now, under the combined stimulus of the new-found gift, the desire for more land and a statelier Abbotsford, and the pressure of the affairs of Ballantyne & Co., that he began to work at the portentous rate which, though I do not believe that it at all injured the quality of his production, pretty certainly endangered his health. During 1814 he had written nearly all his _Life of Swift_, nearly all _Waverley_, the _Lord of the Isles_, and an abundance of "small wares," essays, introductions, and what not. The major part of _Guy Mannering_--perhaps the very best of the novels, for merit of construction and interest of detail--seems to have been written in less than a month, at the extreme end of this year and the beginning of 1815. The whole appears to have been done in six weeks, to "shake himself free of _Waverley_"--probably the most gigantic exhibition of the "hair of the dog" recorded in literature.
The _donnee_ of this novel was furnished by a Dumfries surveyor of taxes, Mr. Train, the scenery by that early visit to Galloway, in the interest of the reverend toyer with sweetie-wives, which has been recorded. Other indebtedness, such as that of Hatteraick to the historical or legendary free-trader, Yawkins, and the like, has been traced. But the charm of the whole lies in none of these things, nor in all together, but in Scott"s own fashion of working them up. Nothing at first could seem to be a greater contrast with _Waverley_ than this tale. No big wars, no political hazards; but a double and tenfold portion of human nature and local colour. This last element had in the earlier book been almost entirely supplied by Tullyveolan and its master; for Fergus and the Highland scenes, good as they are, are not much more than a furbishing up of the poem-matter of this kind, especially in the _Lady of the Lake_. But here the supply of character was liberal and the variety of scenery extraordinary. We cannot judge the innovation fully now, but let anyone turn to the theatrical properties of G.o.dwin and Holcroft, of Mrs. Radcliffe and "Monk" Lewis, and he will begin to have a better idea of what _Guy Mannering_ must have been to its first readers. As usual, the personages who head the _dramatis personae_ are not the best. Bertram, though less of a nincomp.o.o.p than Waverley, is not very much; Lucy is a less lively _ange de candeur_ than Rose, and nothing else; and Julia"s genteel-comedy missishness does not do much more than pair off with Flora"s tragedy-queen air. "Mannering, Guy, a Colonel returned from the Indies,"
is, perhaps, also too fair a description of the player of the t.i.tle-part.[23] But we trouble ourselves very little about these persons.
As for characters, the author opens fire on us almost at the very first with Dominie Sampson and Meg Merrilees, and the hardly less excellent figure of Bertram"s well-meaning b.o.o.by of a father; gives us barely time to make their acquaintance before we meet Dandie Dinmont; brings up almost superfluous reinforcements with Mr. Pleydell, and throughout throws in Hatteraick and Glossin, Jock Jabos and his mistress, and Sir Robert Haslewood, the company at Kippletringan, and at the funeral, and elsewhere, in the most reckless spirit of literary lavishness. Nor is he less prodigal of incident and scene. The opening pa.s.sage of Mannering"s night-ride could not have been bettered if the painter had taken infinitely more pains. Bertram"s walk and the skirmish with the prowlers are simply first-rate; the Edinburgh scenes have always excited admiration as the very best of their kind; and the various pa.s.sages which lead to the working out of justice on Glossin and Hatteraick are not merely told with a gusto, but arranged with a craftsmanship, of which the latter is unfortunately less often present than the former in the author"s later work. There is hardly any book of Scott"s on which it is more tempting to dwell than this. Although the demand had not yet reached anything like its height, two thousand copies were sold in forty-eight hours, and five thousand in three months.
In March 1815 Scott went to London, and met two persons of distinction, the Regent and Lord Byron. There seems to be a little doubt whether George did or did not adapt the joke of the hanging judge, about "checkmating this time," to the authorship of the _Waverley_ novels; but there is no doubt that he was very civil. With Byron Scott was at once on very good terms, for Scott was not the man to bear any grudge for the early fling in _English Bards and Scotch Reviewers_; and Byron, whatever his faults, "had more of lion" in him than to be jealous of such a rival. The difference of their characters was such as to prevent them from being in the strict sense friends; and Scott"s comparison of Byron, after the separation, to a peac.o.c.k parted from the hen and lifting up his voice to tell the world about it, has a rather terribly far-reaching justice, both of moral and literary criticism, on that n.o.ble bard"s whole life and conversation. But there were no little jealousies between them, and apparently some real liking.
This visit to London was extended to Brussels and Paris, with the result in verse of the already mentioned and not particularly happy _Field of Waterloo_, in prose of the interesting _Paul"s Letters to his Kinsfolk_, an account of the tour. Both were published (the poem almost immediately, _Paul_ not till the new year) after Scott"s return to Abbotsford at the end of September; and he set to work during the later autumn on his third novel, _The Antiquary_. The book appeared in May 1816, at about the time of the death of Major John Scott, the last but one of the poet"s surviving brothers. It was not at first so popular as _Guy Mannering_, which, however, it very rapidly caught up even in that respect: nor is this bad start surprising. To good judges nowadays the book appeals as strongly at least as any other of its author"s--in fact, Monkbarns and the Mucklebackits, the rescue of Sir Arthur and Isabel, the scenes in the ruins of St. Ruth"s, and especially Edie Ochiltree, were never surpa.s.sed by him. But the story was a daring innovation, or return, among the novels of its own day. It boldly rejected most of the ordinary sources of romance interest. It had very little plot; its humorous characters, though touched with the rarest art, were not caricatured; and (for which it certainly cannot be praised) that greatest fault of Scott"s,--perhaps his only great fault as a novelist,--the "huddling up" of the end, appears in it for the first, though unluckily by no means for the last, time. But it would have been a very sad thing for the public taste if it had definitely refused _The Antiquary_. A book which contains within the compa.s.s of the opening chapters such masterpieces as the journey to the Hawes, the description of the Antiquary"s study, and the storm and rescue, must have had a generation of idiots for an audience if it had not been successful.
Moreover, it had, as Scott"s unwearied biographer has already noted, a new and special source of interest in the admirable fragmentary mottoes, invented to save the greater labour of discovery, which adorn its chapter-headings.[22] Lockhart himself thought that Scott never quite equalled these first three novels. I cannot agree with him there; but what is certain is that he in them discovered, with extraordinary felicity, skill in three different kinds of novel--the historical, the romantic-adventurous, and that of ordinary or almost wholly ordinary life; and that even he never exactly added a fourth kind to his inventions, though he varied them wonderfully within themselves. The romance partly historical, the romance mainly or wholly fict.i.tious, and the novel of manners; these were his three cla.s.ses, and hardly any others.
It is not entirely explained what were the reasons which determined Scott to make his next venture, the _Tales of my Landlord_, under a fresh pseudonym, and also to publish it not with Constable, but with Murray and Blackwood. Lockhart"s blame of John Ballantyne may not be unfair; but it is rather less supported by doc.u.mentary evidence than most of his strictures on the Ballantynes. And the thing is perhaps to be sufficiently accounted for by Scott"s double dislike, both as an independent person and a man of business, of giving a monopoly of his work to one publisher, and by his constant fancy for trying experiments on the public--a fancy itself not wholly, though partially, comprehensible. As a matter of fact, _Old Mortality_ and the _Black Dwarf_ were offered to and pretty eagerly accepted by Murray and Blackwood, on the terms of half profits and the inevitable batch of "old stock." The story of the unlucky quarrel with Blackwood in consequence of some critical remarks of his on the end of the _Black Dwarf_,--remarks certainly not inexcusable,--and of Scott"s famous letter in reply, will doubtless receive further elucidation in the forthcoming chronicle of the House of "Ebony"; but it is told with fair detail, in the second edition of Lockhart, from the actual archives.
Scott doubled his work during the summer and autumn by undertaking the historical department, relinquished by Southey, of the _Edinburgh Annual Register_, yet the two _Tales_ were ready in November, and appeared on the 1st of December 1816. Murray wrote effusively to Scott (who, it must be remembered, was not even to his publishers the known author), and received a very amusing reply, from which one sentence may be quoted as an example of those which have brought upon Sir Walter the reproach of falsehood, or at least disingenuousness, from Goodman Dull. "I a.s.sure you," he writes, "I have never read a volume of them till they were printed," a delightful selection of words, for it looks decisive, and means absolutely nothing. n.o.body but a magician, and no ordinary magician, could read a _volume_ (which in the usual parlance means a printed volume) before it was printed. To back his disclaimer, Scott offered to review himself in the _Quarterly_, which he did. I certainly do not approve of authors being their own reviewers; though when (as sometimes happens) they have any brains, they probably know the faults and merits of their books better than anyone else, and can at anyrate state, with a precision which is too rare in the ordinary critic, what the book is meant to be and tries to do. But this case was clearly one out of the common way, and rather part of an elaborate practical joke than anything else.
Dulness, however, had in many ways found stumbling-blocks in the first foster-children of the excellent Jedediah. The very pious and learned, if not exactly humorous or shrewd, Dr. M"Crie, fell foul of the picture of the Covenanters given in _Old Mortality_. No one who knows the doc.u.ments is likely to agree with him now, and from hardly any point of view but his could the greatness of the book be denied. Although Scott"s humour is by no means absent from it, that quality does not perhaps find quite such an opportunity, even in Mause and Cuddie, as in the Baron, and the Dominie, and the inhabitants of Monkbarns. But as a historical novel, it is a far greater one than _Waverley_. Drumclog, the siege of Tillietudlem, above all, the matchless scene where Morton is just saved from murder by his own party, surpa.s.s anything in the earlier book. But greater than any of these single things is one of the first and the greatest of Scott"s splendid gallery of romantic-historic portraits, the stately figure of Claverhouse. All the features which he himself was to sum up in that undying sentence of Wandering Willie"s Tale later are here put in detail and justified.
As for the companion to this masterly book, I have always thought the earlier part of the _Black Dwarf_ as happy as all but the best of Scott"s work. But the character of the _Dwarf_ himself was not one that he could manage. The nullity of Earnscliff and Isabel is complete.
Isabel"s father is a stagy villain, or rather rascal (for Victor Hugo"s ant.i.thesis between _scelerat_ and _maroufle_ comes in here), and even Scott has never hustled off a conclusion with such complete _insouciance_ as to anything like completeness. Willie of Westburnflat here, like Christie of the Clinthill later, is one of our old friends of the poems back again, and welcome back again. But he and Hobbie can hardly save a book which Scott seems to have thrown in with its admirable companion, not as a makeweight, but rather as a foil.
Between the first and the second sets of _Tales_, the "Author of _Waverley_," true to his odd design of throwing the public off the scent, reappeared, and the result was _Rob Roy_. Perhaps because it was written under the first attacks of that "cramp of the stomach" which, though obscurely connected with his later and more fatal ailments, no doubt ushered them in something more than an accidental manner, Scott did not at first much like _Rob_. But he was reconciled later; and hardly anybody else (except those exceedingly unhappy persons who cannot taste him at all) can ever have had any doubt about it. That the end is even more than usually huddled, that the beginning may perhaps have dawdled a little over commercial details (I do not think so myself, but Lady Louisa Stuart did), and that the distribution of time, which lingers over weeks and months before and after it devotes almost the major part of the book to the events of forty-eight hours, is irregular, even in the eyes of those who are not serfs to the unities, cannot be denied. But almost from the introduction of Frank to Diana, certainly from his setting off in the grey of the morning with Andrew Fairservice, to the point at least where the heroine stoops from her pony in a manner equally obliging and graceful, there is no dropped st.i.tch, no false note. Nor in any book are there so many of Scott"s own characters, and others not quite so much his own. Helen Macgregor, perhaps, does not "thrill our blood and overpower our reason," as she did Lady Louisa"s, simply because we were born some hundred years later than that acute and accomplished granddaughter of Lady Mary; and Rashleigh pretty frequently, Rob himself now and then, may also savour to us a little of the boards and the sawdust. But, as a rule, Rob does not; and for n.o.body else, not even for the fortunate Frank,--who has nothing to do but to walk through his part creditably, and does it,--need any allowance be made. The Bailie is, with Shallow, his brother justice (upon whom he justly looks down, but to whom he is, I think, kind) in Arthur"s bosom; Andrew Fairservice and the Dougal creature, Justice Inglewood and Sir Hildebrand, are there too. As for Die Vernon, she is the one of Scott"s heroines with whom one _has to_ fall in love, just as, according to a beautiful story, a thoughtless and reluctant world _had to_ believe the Athanasian Creed. It is painful to say that persons on whom it is impossible to retort the charge, have sometimes insinuated a touch of vulgarity in Di. For these one can but pray; and, after all, they are usually of her s.e.x, which in such judgments of itself counts not. All men, who are men and gentlemen, must delight in her. And here, as always, to all but the very last, even in the twilight of _Anne of Geierstein_, the succession of scenes hurries the reader along without breath or time to stop and criticise, with nothing to do, if he is a reasonable person, but to read and enjoy and admire.
Lockhart has taken the opportunity of this point of time (1817-1818), which may be said to mark the zenith of Scott"s prosperity, if not of his fame, to halt and to give a sort of survey of his father-in-law"s private life at Castle Street and at Abbotsford. It forms one of the pleasantest portions of his book, containing nothing more tragic than the advent of the famous American tragedy of _The Cherokee Lovers_, which its careful author sent, that Scott might approve and publish it, in duplicate, so that the unfortunate recipient had to pay five pounds twice over for the postage of the rubbish. Of course things were not entirely as they seemed. The cramps with which, as mentioned, Scott had been already seized, during the progress of _Rob Roy_, were, though probably not caused, yet all too much helped and hastened, by the ferocious manner in which he worked his brains. For it must be doubted whether social intercourse, or even bodily exercise in company with others, is really the best refreshment after very severe mental labour.
Both distract and amuse; but they do not refresh, relax, relieve, like a bath of pure solitude.
Divers events of importance happened to Scott, in the later course of the year 1818[21] (besides a much worse recurrence of his disorder), after the _Heart of Midlothian_ (the second series of the _Tales_) had been published in June, and the _Bride of Lammermoor_ (the third series) had been begun. The Duke of Buccleuch, his chief, his (as he would himself have cheerfully allowed) patron, his helper in time of need, and his most intimate friend, died. So did his brother-in-law, Charles Carpenter, this latter death adding considerably, though to an extent exaggerated at first and only reversionary, to the prospects of Scott"s children. He gave up an idea, which he had for some time held, of obtaining a judgeship of the Scotch Exchequer; but he received his baronetcy in April 1820. Abbotsford went on gradually and expensively completing itself; the correspondence which tells us so much and is such delightful reading continued, as if the writer had nothing else to write and nothing else to do. But for us the chief matters of interest are the two novels mentioned, and that admirable supplement to the second of them, the _Legend of Montrose_.
There can be little doubt, I think, that in at least pa.s.sages, and those very large ones, of the _Heart of Midlothian_, Scott went as high as he ever had done, or ever did thereafter. I have never agreed with Lady Louisa Stuart that "Mr. Saddletree is not amusing," nor that there is too much Scots law for English readers. It must be remembered that until Scott opened people"s eyes, there were some very singular conventions and prejudices, even in celestial minds, about novels. Technical details were voted tedious and out of place--as, Heaven knows! M. Zola and others have shown us since, that they may very easily be made.
Professional matters, the lower middle cla.s.ses, etc., were thought "low," as Goldsmith"s audience had had it, "vulgar," as Madame de Stael said of Miss Austen. That the farrago of the novelist"s book is absolutely universal and indiscriminate, provided only that he knows what to do with it, had not dawned on the general mind. On the other hand, Lady Louisa was right in objecting to the finale,--it has been admitted that Scott was never good at a conclusion,--and personally I have always thought George Staunton uninteresting throughout. But how much does this leave! The description of the lynching of Porteous and the matchless interview with Queen Caroline are only the very best of such a series of good things that, except just at the end, it may be said to be uninterrupted. Jeanie it is unnecessary to praise; the same Lady Louisa"s admiration of the wonderful art which could attract so much interest to a plain, good, not clever, almost middle-aged woman sums up all. But almost everyone plays up to Jeanie in perfection--her father and, to no small extent, her sister, her husband and Dumbied.y.k.es, Madge Wildfire (a most difficult and most successful character) and her old fiend of a mother, the Duke and the tobacco-shop keeper. Abundant as are the good things afterwards, I do not know that Scott ever showed his actual original genius, his faculty of creation and combination, to such an extent and in such proportion again.
He certainly did not, so far as my taste goes, in _The Bride of Lammermoor_, a book which, putting the mere fragment of the _Black Dwarf_ aside, seems to me his first approach to failure in prose.
Lockhart, whose general critical opinions deserve the profoundest respect, thought differently--thought it, indeed, "the most pure and perfect of all the tragedies that Scott ever penned." Perhaps there is something in this of the same ingenuity which Scott himself showed in his disclaimer to Murray quoted above, for tragedy _per se_ was certainly not Scott"s forte to the same extent as were comedy and history. But I know that there are many who agree with Lockhart. On the other hand, I should say that while we do not know enough of the House of Ravenswood to feel much sympathy with its fortunes as a house, the "conditions," in the old sense, of its last representative are not such as to attract us much to him personally. He is already far too much of that hero of opera which he was destined to become, a sulky, stagy creature, in theatrical poses and a black-plumed hat, who cannot even play the easy and perennially attractive part of _desdichado_ so as to keep our compa.s.sion. Lucy is a simpleton so utter and complete that it is difficult even to be sorry for her, especially as Ravenswood would have made a detestable husband. The mother is meant to be and is a repulsive virago, and the father a time-serving and almost vulgar intriguer. Moreover--and all this is not in the least surprising, since he was in agonies during most of the composition, and nearly died before its close[20]--the author has, contrary to his wont, provided very few subsidiary characters to support or carry off the princ.i.p.als. Caleb Balderstone has been perhaps unduly objected to by the very persons who praise the whole book; but he is certainly somewhat of what the French call a _charge_. Bucklaw, though agreeable, is very slight; Craigengelt a mere "super"; the Marquis shadowy. Even such fine things as the hags at the laying-out, and the visit of Lucy and her father to Wolf"s Crag, and such amusing ones as Balderstone"s _fabliau_-like expedients to raise the wind in the matter of food, hardly save the situation; and though the tragedy of the end is complete, it leaves me, I own, rather cold.[19] One is sorry for Lucy, but it was really her own fault--a Scottish maiden is not usually unaware of the possibilities and advantages of "kilting her coats of green satin" and flying from the lad she does not love to the lad she does. The total disappearance of Edgar is the best thing that could happen to him, and the only really satisfactory point is Bucklaw"s very gentlemanlike sentence of arrest on all impertinent questioners.
But if the companion of the first set of _Tales_ was a dead-weight rather than a make-weight, the make-weight of the third would have atoned for anything. Sometimes I think, allowing for scale and conditions, that Scott never did anything much better than _A Legend of Montrose_. First, it is pervaded by the magnificent figure of Dugald Dalgetty. Secondly, the story, though with something of the usual huddle at the end, is interesting throughout, with the minor figures capitally sketched in. Menteith, though merely outlined, is a good fellow, a gentleman, and not a stick; Allan escapes the merely melodramatic; "Gillespie Grumach" is masterly in his brief appearances; and Montrose himself seems to me to be brought in with a skill which has too often escaped notice. For it would mar the story to deal with the tragedy of his end, and his earlier history is a little awkward to manage.
Moreover, that faculty of hurrying on the successive _tableaux_ which is so conspicuous in most of Scott"s work, and so conspicuously absent in the _Bride_ (where there are long pa.s.sages with no action at all) is eminently present here. The meeting with Dalgetty; the night at Darnlinvarach, from the bravado of the candlesticks to Menteith"s tale; the gathering and council of the clans; the journey of Dalgetty, with its central point in the Inverary dungeon; the escape; and the battle of Inverlochy,--these form an exemplary specimen of the kind of interest which Scott"s best novels possess as nothing of the kind had before possessed it, and as few things out of Dumas have possessed it since.
Nor can the most fervent admirer of Chicot and of Porthos--I know none more fervent than myself--say in cool blood that their creator could have created Dalgetty, who is at once an admirable human being, a wonderful national type of the more eccentric kind, and the embodiment of an astonishing amount of judiciously adjusted erudition.
Many incidents of interest and some of importance occurred in Scott"s private life between the date of 1818 and that of 1820, besides those mentioned already. One of these was the acquisition by Constable of the whole of his back-copyrights for the very large sum of twelve thousand pounds, a contract supplemented twice later in 1821 and 1823 by fresh purchases of rights as they accrued for nominal sums of eleven thousand pounds in addition. Unfortunately, this transaction, like almost all his later ones, was more fict.i.tious than real. And though it was lucky that the publisher never discharged the full debt, so that when his bankruptcy occurred something was saved out of the wreck which would otherwise have been pure loss, the proceeding is characteristic of the mischievously unreal system of money transactions which brought Scott to ruin. Except for small things like review articles, etc., and for his official salaries, he hardly ever touched real money for the fifteen most prosperous years of his life, between 1810 and 1825. Promises to receive were interchanged with promises to pay in such a bewildering fashion that unless he had kept a chartered accountant of rather unusual skill and industry perpetually at work, it must have been utterly impossible for him to know at any given time what he had, what he owed, what was due to him, and what his actual income and expenditure were. The commonly accepted estimate is that during the most flourishing time, 1820-1825, he made about fifteen thousand a year, and on paper he probably did. Nor can he ever have spent, in the proper sense of the term, anything like that sum, for the Castle Street house cannot have cost, even with lavish hospitality, much to keep up, and the Abbotsford establishment, though liberal, was never ostentatious. But when large lump sums are constantly expended in purchases of land, building, furnishing, and the like; when every penny of income except official salaries goes through a complicated process of abatement in the way of discounts for six and twelve months" bills, fines for renewal, payments to banks for advances and the like--the "clean" sums available at any given moment bear quite fantastic and untrustworthy relations to their nominal representatives. It may be strongly suspected, from the admitted decrease of a very valuable practice under Walter Scott _pere_, and from its practical disappearance under Thomas, that the genius of the Scott family did not precisely lie in the management of money.
The marriage of Sophia Scott to Lockhart, and the purchase of a commission for her eldest brother Walter in the 18th Hussars, made gaps in Scott"s family circle, and also, beyond all doubt, in his finances.
The first was altogether happy for him. It did not, for at anyrate some years, absolutely sever him from the dearest of his children, a lady who, to judge from her portraits, must have been of singular charm, and who seems to have been the only one of the four with much of his mental characteristics; it provided him with an agreeable companion, a loyal friend, and an incomparable biographer. Of Sir Walter Scott the second and last, not much personal idea is obtainable. The few anecdotes handed down, and his father"s letters to him (we have no replies), suggest a good sort of person, slightly "chuckle-headed" and perfervid in the wrong places, with next to no intellectual gifts, and perhaps more his mother"s son than his father"s. He had some difficulties in his first regiment, which seems to have been a wild one, and not in the best form; he married an heiress of the unpoetical name of Jobson, to whom and of whom his father writes with a pretty old-fashioned affection and courtesy, which perhaps gave Thackeray some traits for Colonel Newcome.
Of the younger brother Charles, an Oxford man, who went into the Foreign Office, even less is recorded than of Walter. Anne Scott, the third of the family, and the faithful attendant of her father in his last evil days, died in her sister"s house shortly after Sir Walter, and Mrs.
Lockhart herself followed before the _Life_ was finished. Scott can hardly be said to have bequeathed good luck to any of these his descendants.
It was at the end of 1819, after Walter the younger left home, and before Sophia"s marriage, that the next in order of the _Waverley Novels_ (now again such by t.i.tle, and not _Tales of my Landlord_) appeared. This was _Ivanhoe_, which was published in a rather costlier shape than its forerunners, and yet sold to the extent of twelve thousand copies in its three-volume form. Lockhart, perhaps with one of the few but graceful escapes of national predilection (it ought not to be called prejudice) to be noticed in him, p.r.o.nounces this a greater work of art, but a less in genius than its purely Scottish predecessors.
As there is nothing specially English in _Ivanhoe_, but only an attempt to delineate Normans and Saxons before the final blend was formed, an Englishman may, perhaps, claim at least impartiality if he accepts the positive part of Lockhart"s judgment and demurs to the negative.
Although the worst of Scott"s cramps were past, he was still in anything but good health when he composed the novel, most of which was dictated, not written; and his avocations and bodily troubles together may have had something to do with those certainly pretty flagrant anachronisms which have brought on _Ivanhoe_ the wrath of Dryasdust. But Dryasdust is _adeo negligibile ut negligibilius nihil esse possit_, and the book is a great one from beginning to end. The mere historians who quarrel with it have probably never read the romances which justify it, even from the point of view of literary "doc.u.ment." The picturesque opening; the Shakespearean character of Wamba; the splendid Pa.s.sage of Arms; the more splendid siege of Torquilstone; the gathering up of a dozen popular stories of the "King-and-the-Tanner" kind into the episodes of the Black Knight and the Friar; the admirable, if a little conventional, sketch of Bois-Guilbert, the pendant in prose to Marmion; the more admirable contrast of Rebecca and Rowena; and the final Judgment of G.o.d, which for once vindicates Scott from the charge of never being able to wind up a novel,--with such subsidiary sketches as Gurth, Prior Aymer, Isaac, Front-de-Boeuf (Urfried, I fear, will not quite do, except in the final interview with her tempter-victim), Athelstane, and others--give such a plethora of creative and descriptive wealth as n.o.body but Scott has ever put together in prose. Even the nominal hero, it is to be observed, escapes the curse of most of Scott"s young men (the young men to several of whom Thackeray would have liked to be mother-in-law), and if he is not worthy of Rebecca, he does not get her. As for Richard, no doubt, he is not the Richard of history, but what does that matter? He is a most admirable re-creation, softened and refined, of the Richard of a romance which, be it remembered, is itself in all probability as old as the thirteenth century.
After speaking frankly of the _Bride of Lammermoor_ and of some others of Scott"s works, it may perhaps be permissible to rate the successor to _Ivanhoe_ rather higher than it was rated at the time, or than it has generally been rated since. _The Monastery_ was at its appearance (March 1820) regarded as a failure; and quite recently a sincere admirer of Scott confided to a fellow in that worship the opinion that "a good deal of it really is rot, you know." I venture to differ. Undoubtedly it does not rank with the very best, or even next to them. In returning to Scottish ground, Scott may have strengthened himself on one side, but from the distance of the times and the obscure and comparatively uninteresting period which he selected (just after the strange and rapid panorama of the five Jameses and before the advent of Queen Mary), he lost as much as he gained. An intention, afterwards abandoned, to make yet a fresh start, and try a new double on the public by appearing neither as "Author of _Waverley_" nor as Jedediah Cleishbotham, may have hampered him a little, though it gave a pleasant introduction. The supernatural part, though much better, as it seems to me, than is generally admitted, is no doubt not entirely satisfactory, being uncertainly handled, and subject to the warning of _Nec deus intersit_.
There is some return of that superabundance of interval and inaction which has been noted in the _Bride_. And, above all, there appears here a fault which had not been noticeable before, but which was to increase upon Scott,--the fault of introducing a character as if he were to be of great pith and moment, and then letting his interest, as the vernacular says, "tail off." The trouble taken about Halbert by personages natural and supernatural promises the case of some extraordinary figure, and he is but very ordinary. Still, at the works of how many novelists except Scott should we grumble, if we had the admirable descriptions of Glendearg, the scenes in the Abbey, the night-ride of poor Father Philip, the escape from the Castle of Avenel, the pa.s.sage of the interview of Halbert with Murray and Morton? Even the episode of Sir Piercie Shafton, though it is most indisputably true that Scott has not by any means truly represented Euphuism, is good and amusing in itself; while there are those who boldly like the White Lady personally. She is more futile than a sprite beseems; but she is distinctly "nice."
At any rate, n.o.body could (or indeed did) deny that the author, six months later, made up for any shortcoming in _The Abbot_, where, except the end (eminently of the huddled order), everything is as it should be.
The heroine is, except Die Vernon, Scott"s masterpiece in that kind, while all the Queen Mary scenes are unsurpa.s.sed in him, and rarely equalled out of him. Nor was there any falling off in _Kenilworth_ (Jan.
1821), where he again shifted his scene to England. He has not indeed interested us very much personally in Amy Robsart, but as a hapless heroine she is altogether the superior of Lucy Ashton. The book is, among his, the "novel without a hero," and, considering his defects in that direction, this was hardly a drawback. It cannot be indeed said to have any one minor character which is a success of the first cla.s.s. But the whole is interesting throughout. The journeys of Tressilian to Devonshire and of Amy and Wayland to Kenilworth have the curious attraction which Scott, a great traveller, and a lover of it, knew how to give to journeys, and the pageantry and Court scenes, at Greenwich and elsewhere, command admiration. Indeed, _Kenilworth_ equals any of the novels in sustained variety of interest, and, unlike too many of them, it comes to a real end.
It was in 1821 that a book now necessarily much forgotten and even rare (it is comparatively seldom that one sees it in catalogues), Adolphus"s _Letters on the Author of Waverley_, at once showed the interest taken in the ident.i.ty of the "Great Unknown," and fixed it as being that of the author of the _Lay_, with a great deal of ingenuity and with a most industrious abundance of arguments, bad and good. After such a proof of public interest, neither Scott nor Constable could be much blamed for working what has been opprobriously called the "novel manufactory" at the highest pressure; and _The Pirate_, _The Fortunes of Nigel_, _Peveril of the Peak_, _Quentin Durward_, _St. Ronan"s Well_, and _Redgauntlet_ were written and published in the closest succession.