Waverley; Or, 'Tis Sixty Years Since. Lang Andrew

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СКАЧАТЬ lived in the greatest poetical ago since that of Elizabeth. Poetry or the drama (in which, to be sure, few succeeded) occupied Wordsworth, Byron, Coleridge, Shelley, Crabbe, Campbell, and Keats. Then, as Joanna Baillie hyperbolically declared, “The Scotch novels put poetry out of fashion.”

      [Abbotsford Manuscripts. Hogg averred that nobody either read or wrote poetry after Sir Walter took to prose.]

      Till they appeared, novels seem to have been left to readers like the plaintive lady’s-maid whom Scott met at Dalkeith, when he beheld “the fair one descend from the carriage with three half-bound volumes of a novel in her hand.” Mr. Morritt, writing to Scott in March, 1815, hopes he will “restore pure narrative to the dignity from which it gradually slipped before it dwindled into a manufactory for the circulating library.” “Waverley,” he asserted, “would prevail over people otherwise averse to blue-backed volumes.” Thus it was an unconsidered art which Scott took up and revived. Half a century had passed since Fielding gave us in “Tom Jones” his own and very different picture of life in the “‘forty-five,” – of life with all the romance of the “Race to Derby” cut down to a sentence or two. Since the age of the great English novelists, Richardson and Fielding and Miss Burney, the art of fiction had been spasmodically alive in the hands of Mrs. Radcliffe, had been sentimental with Henry Mackenzie, and now was all but moribund, save for the humorous Irish sketches of Miss Edgeworth. As Scott always insisted, it was mainly “the extended and well-merited fame of Miss Edgeworth” which induced him to try his hand on a novel containing pictures of Scottish life and character. Nothing was more remarkable in his own novels than the blending of close and humorous observation of common life with pleasure in adventurous narratives about “what is not so, and was not so, and Heaven forbid that it ever should be so,” as the girl says in the nursery tale. Through his whole life he remained the dreamer of dreams and teller of wild legends, who had held the lads of the High School entranced round Luckie Brown’s fireside, and had fleeted the summer days in interchange of romances with a schoolboy friend, Mr. Irving, among the hills that girdle Edinburgh. He ever had a passion for “knights and ladies and dragons and giants,” and “God only knows,” he says, “how delighted I was to find myself in such society.” But with all this delight, his imagination had other pleasures than the fantastic: the humours and passions of ordinary existence were as clearly visible to him as the battles, the castles, and the giants. True, he was more fastidious in his choice of novels of real life than in his romantic reading. “The whole Jemmy and Jessamy tribe I abhorred,” he said; “and it required the art of Burney or the feeling of Mackenzie to fix my attention upon a domestic tale.” But when the domestic tale was good and true, no man appreciated it more than he. None has more vigorously applauded Miss Austen than Scott, and it was thus that as the “Author of ‘Waverley’” he addressed Miss Edgeworth, through James Ballantyne: “If I could but hit it, Miss Edgeworth’s wonderful power of vivifying all her persons, and making there live as beings in your mind, I should not be afraid.” “Often,” Ballantyne goes on, “has the Author of ‘Waverley’ used such language to me; and I knew that I gratified him most when I could say, ‘Positively, this is equal to Miss Edgeworth.’”

      Thus Scott’s own taste was catholic: and in this he was particularly unlike the modern novelists, who proclaim, from both sides of the Atlantic, that only in their own methods, and in sharing their own exclusive tastes, is literary salvation. The prince of Romance was no one-sided romanticiste; his ear was open to all fiction good in its kind. His generosity made him think Miss Edgeworth’s persons more alive than his own. To his own romances he preferred Mrs. Shelley’s “Frankenstein.”

      [Scott reviewed “Frankenstein” in 1818. Mr. Shelley had sent it with a brief note, it, which he said that it was the work of a friend, and that he had only seen it through the press. Sir Walter passed the hook on to Mr. Murritt, who, in reply, gave Scott a brief and not very accurate history of Shelley. Sir Walter then wrote a most favourable review of “Frankenstein” in “Blackwood’s Magazine,” observing that it was attributed to Mr. Percy Bysshe Shelley, a son-in-law of Mr. Godwin. Mrs. Shelley presently wrote thanking him for the review, and assuring him that it was her own work. Scott had apparently taken Sheller’s disclaimer as an innocent evasion; it was an age of literary superscheries. – Abbotsford Manuscripts.]

      As a critic, of course, he was mistaken; but his was the generous error of the heart, and it is the heart in Walter Scott, even more than the brain, that lends its own vitality to his creations. Equipped as he was with a taste truly catholic, capable in old age of admiring “Pelham,” he had the power to do what he calls “the big bow-wow strain;” yet he was not, as in his modesty he supposed, denied “the exquisite torch which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting, from the truth of the description and the sentiment.”

      The letter of Rose Bradwardine to Waverley is alone enough to disprove Scott’s disparagement of himself, his belief that he had been denied exquisiteness of touch. Nothing human is more delicate, nothing should be more delicately handled, than the first love of a girl. What the “analytical” modern novelist would pass over and dissect and place beneath his microscope till a student of any manliness blushes with shame and annoyance, Scott suffers Rose Bradwardine to reveal with a sensitive shyness. But Scott, of course, had even less in common with the peeper and botanizer on maidens’ hearts than with the wildest romanticist. He considered that “a want of story is always fatal to a book the first reading, and it is well if it gets a chance of a second.” From him “Pride and Prejudice” got a chance of three readings at least. This generous universality of taste, in addition to all his other qualities of humour and poetry, enabled Scott to raise the novel from its decadence, and to make the dry bones of history live again in his tales. With Charles Edward at Holyrood, as Mr. Senior wrote in the “Quarterly Review,” “we are in the lofty region of romance. In any other hands than those of Sir Walter Scott, the language and conduct of those great people would have been as dignified as their situations. We should have heard nothing of the hero in his new costume ‘majoring afore the muckle pier-glass,’ of his arrest by the hint of the Candlestick, of his examination by the well-powdered Major Melville, or of his fears of being informed against by Mrs. Nosebag.” In short, “while the leading persons and events are as remote from ordinary life as the inventions of Scudery, the picture of human nature is as faithful as could have been given by Fielding or Le Sage.” Though this criticism has not the advantage of being new, it is true; and when we have added that Scott’s novels are the novels of the poet who, next to Shakspeare, knew mankind most widely and well, we have the secret of his triumph.

      For the first time in literature, it was a poet who held the pen of the romancer in prose. Fielding, Richardson, De Foe, Miss Rurnev, were none of them made by the gods poetical. Scott himself, with his habitual generosity, would have hailed his own predecessor in Mrs. Radcliffe. “The praise may be claimed for Mrs. Radcliffe of having been the first to introduce into her prose fictions a beautiful and fanciful tone of natural description and impressive narrative, which had hitherto been exclusively applied to poetry… Mrs. Radcliffe has a title to be considered the first poetess of romantic fiction.” When “Guy Mannering” appeared, Wordsworth sneered at it as a work of the Radcliffe school. The slight difference produced by the introduction of humour could scarcely be visible to Wordsworth. But Scott would not have been hurt by his judgment. He had the literary courage to recognize merit even when obscured by extravagance, and to applaud that in which people of culture could find neither excellence nor charm. Like Thackeray, he had been thrilled by Vivaidi in the Inquisition, and he was not the man to hide his gratitude because his author was now out of fashion.

      Thus we see that Scott, when he began “Waverley” in 1805, brought to his labour no hard-and-fast theory of the art of fiction, but a kindly readiness to be pleased, and to find good in everything. He brought his wide knowledge of contemporary Scottish life “from the peer to the ploughman;” he brought his well-digested wealth of antiquarian lore, and the poetic skill which had just been busied with the “Lay of the Last Minstrel,” and was still to be occupied, ere he finished his interrupted novel, with “Marmion,” “The Lady of the Lake,” “Rokeby,” and “The Lord of the СКАЧАТЬ