Sir Walter Scott: I. A Study in Genius
I
‘No,’ said the lady in the bus, — she had to speak rather loud to make herself heard above the din of the traffic, — ‘No, I used to like Scott as a child, but I never read him now.’ ‘I don t suppose one could,’ replied her cultivated companion. But only a hundred and fifteen years ago schoolboys risked a birching, young ladies neglected their harps, old gentlemen left their glasses of Madeira half full, crabbed, bright-eyed William Hazlitt forgot his hatred of Toryism — to finish Waverley.
Truly, of all our novelists it is Scott whose reputation has undergone the greatest vicissitudes. Admired in his own day as no English novelist has ever been admired, his only regular readers nowadays are schoolboys who study his works under compulsion and without pleasure, as a holiday task. Now and again an old-fashioned supporter will praise him for his healthy tone — a moral rather than a literary virtue. But among serious critics his reputation has slipped silently away till even Mr. E. M. Forster — acute, sensitive Mr. E. M. Forster — can state that he was no more than a glorified writer of child’s books, devoid of that quality of serious passion which is the mark of a great writer.
It is largely Scott’s own fault. But it is his readers’ misfortune. For his contemporaries were in the right. He is a very great novelist indeed; and, so far from not being serious, touches depths and heights often that most English novelists could never touch at all. But his merits do not lie open for every eye to see, especially the sort of eye with which people are taught to regard novels nowadays. One must learn how to appreciate him.
Of course to appreciate him properly one must realize his range, A novel is a work of art in so far as it has an independent, individual life of its own in so far as it is a world. And this independent life is begotten by the writer’s creative imagination on his experience. But in any one writer there is only a certain proportion of its value that can be so fertilized, only a certain proportion of what he sees and feels and knows that strikes deep enough into the fundamentals of his personality to fire his imagination to work. The proportion varies with the individual artist. With some it is small. Henry James rings the changes on one or two characters, one or two motives, one or two situations. On the other hand, there is hardly an aspect of his own life or of anyone else’s that did not come as grist to Tolstoy’s mill. But whether it be big or small, only that particular part of his experience that fires the writer’s imagination will be of any use to him as artist. His artistic achievement must lie within its four corners; it is his range.
To realize this range, therefore, is the first thing we must do when estimating a writer. If we do not know what he can do, how can we tell if he is doing it? This might seem obvious. But critics do not appear to think it so. They are always writing articles scolding Mr. Aldous Huxley because his books have not the exuberant spirits of Dickens, or taking Sir James Barrie to task because his picture of life lacks that fine, frank attack on sex problems which they find so admirable a characteristic of Mr. D. H. Lawrence. But themes entailing exuberant enjoyment do not set Mr. Huxley’s imagination to work, nor sexual problems inspire Sir James Barrie’s. If they did write about these topics, as likely as not they would fail; for they would be outside their range. And to blame a writer for failing to write outside his range is as beside the point as to blame a sculptor because his work is colorless.
II
What, then, is Scott’s range? It is all that part of experience which concerns man as a product of his local environment and his historic past. Every great novelist is primarily a portrayer of human character; but whereas Fielding, say, paints man in his relation to his fellow men and Dostoevski in his relation to God, Scott paints him in relation to the circumstances and traditions — political, social, religious, natural — of the society in which he lives.
As Balzac points out, it is Scott’s chief and splendid claim to originality that he was the first writer to bring these considerations into the novel at all. The novelists of the eighteenth century, the positive, unmystical eighteenth century, represent character as a detached phenomenon, owing nothing to its surroundings. Parson Adams, Dr. Primrose, Uncle Toby, are presented to us as cut flowers, their outlines sharp, their colors vivid against the white, brightly lit walls of the botanist’s laboratory. We are told nothing of their natural background, the garden where they grew, the weather in which they blossomed; their historic or religious social environment, and how it made them what they were. Parson Adams is a clergyman and an Englishman; but these facts tell us nothing significant about him. For the aspects of his character with which Fielding is concerned are not those which he has acquired from the world he has lived in, but the individual idiosyncrasies which differentiate him from it. He could be turned into a Catholic Irish priest and we should still recognize him.
Now to Scott such a view of character was impossible. His distinguishing characteristic was a sense of the past. It determined his whole attitude toward life; no other novelist has ever had it to anything like the same degree. And thus, though he too had an acute appreciation of the individual, he always envisaged him in relation to his historic past: as a social animal shaped and colored by those vaster, more impersonal forces of historic condition and trend which had shaped and colored the community of which he was a member. Every man he met. he saw as a focus of these forces — betraying willy-nilly by word and act and prejudice, by his every trick of speech and gesture, the nation and place and creed and tradition which had moulded him to what he was.
Compare Parson Adams with a typical Scott figure like Edie Ochiltree. They have a great deal in common; both are distinguished representatives of the same tradition — that great English tradition of the semihumorous ‘character part’ that extends from Dame Quickly to Kipps, made living to us by its actions, its individual idiosyncrasies of speech and habit, rather than by direct diagnosis or analysis. But Edie Ochiltree has not been uprooted from the garden where he grew; he does not appear before us against the uncolored background of a laboratory wall. Round him swirl the mists of the Scotch lowlands which are his home; to his right rises the meetinghouse of that Presbyterian church where he learned his creed; to his left, the grim castle of Glenallan whose serfs were his forefathers; from his shoulders falls the blue gown of that ancient Scottish order of beggars of whom he is so majestic an example; while faintly from the hills behind him echoes a snatch of those ancient folk ballads which have given its peculiar twist and tint to his imagination. To alter his circumstances, to turn him into an Irish Catholic beggar, would be to make him an unrecognizably different person. Scott looked on a man as an antiquarian looks at a house — to whom here a square of gray stone, there a brick gable, here again a fragment of sumptuous carving, reveal Norman foundation rebuilding in Tudor times a room redecorated under Queen Anne.
As a matter of fact, Scott would have looked on an old house like this too. The elaborate landscapes and interiors that fill his books are described in terms of the past. A dimple in the down marks the track where the mosstroopers rode down from the hills, a broken stone half hidden by heather shows where stood a wrecked Cistercian abbey; how rusty that old sword glints against the paneling — it has not been taken down since it was hung there after the battle of Culloden sixty years since. Man and nature alike are to Scott first of all expressions of their history. This is his range.
III
Limited range of interest implies limited choice of subject. And Scott’s range of interest confines his creative achievement to certain aspects of human life — those which peculiarly illustrate its connection with the past. All his great characters are the children of small communities, close corporations, remote localities, age-old traditions, the sharp angles cut by whose influence have been unmodified by contact with the great changing, impersonal, cosmopolitan world: Evan Dhu, the Highlander; Dandie Dinmont, the Cumberland farmer; Davie Deans, the old Covenanter; Wandering Willie, the beggar minstrel. Many of the most memorable are beggars and poor people; for spending their life, as they do, in a small area, unable to learn much about other people and ideas from books, they are especially the creatures of their historic environment; it saturates every fibre of their natures. ‘I have chosen my personages,’says Scott, in his introduction to The Antiquary, ‘from the class of society which are the last to feel the influence of that general polish which assimilates to each other the manners of different nations.’
In the same way his range of interest determines his themes. The conflicts on which his plots turn are not, as with most novelists, between two individual temperaments; but between an individual temperament and a tradition, or sometimes between the representatives of one tradition and of another. Jeanie Deans is torn between love of her sister and the strict commands of the Covenanting faith in which she has been educated; Elspeth of the Craigburnfoot between loyalty to the Glenallan family and her desire to make reparation for a crime committed in their service; Ravenswood between his love for Lucy and his inherited feud with her family. Meg Merrilies is compelled by her conscience to restore the wrongfully deposed heir of Ellangowan to his inheritance. Harry Wake and Robin Oig are forced into mortal and unwilling combat by the conflicting conceptions of honor instilled into them by national tradition. And the emotions which fire the books are the emotions single, epic, common to mankind, which such conflicts engender: love of home and country, pride in ancient institutions, regret for their passing, awe and superstitious terror stirred by the sense of the past still at work in our own lives, hatred kindled by an ancient wrong, loyalty to creed or kindred or the fortunes of a fallen king.
Finally Scott’s choice of subject is limited by a third and different consideration. No serious novelist writes well about worlds he has not lived in. He gets distracted by the superficial aspects of its inhabitants, he cannot get sufficiently under their skins to light the spark of life there. Fearful and wonderful are the results when Dickens leaves the lower and middle classes he knew so well to share in the gilded revels of Sir Mulberry Hawk; or when George Eliot turns her conscientious Victorian British hand to the sins and splendors of fifteenth-century Florence. But what is true of George Eliot and Dickens is far truer of Scott. For his chief interest in character lies precisely in those fine distinctions of social and national character which an outsider can never understand. All Scott’s best books, Waverley, Guy Mannering, The Antiquary, The Heart of Midlothian, Redgauntlet, Old Mortality, The Bride of Lammermoor, have for their setting Scotland and its borders; and in all of them the action takes place within that hundred or so years of his birth covered by the memory of someone he might have known.
IV
Such is Scott’s range. And there is no denying that it has striking limitations. Apart from anything else, it leaves out all that vast, varied area of human activity and interest we call private life; all man’s preoccupations as an individual, pursuing his individual happiness, his personal hopes, fears and problems, pleasures and weaknesses and aspirations. And with these, except in so far as they come into contact with the claims of the wider forces of history and environment, go his relations to other people, to parents, children, friends — above all, to the other sex.
This last is possibly the chief cause why people do not think Scott is a serious novelist. Sex is the most personal thing in the world; exclusively a private affair between two people; stirring the same reactions, undergoing the same vicissitudes in all countries, in all centuries, when Rome is falling or Chicago rising. It is obviously no subject for Scott. But it is, after all, the primary passion of human nature; and any picture of life which gives little account of it will seem to the average man, and still more to the average woman, rather unreal. So that the average man, still more the average woman, tends to start with the idea that Scott is no more than a superior writer of fanciful adventure stories.
His range of characters is limited, too. A great many people’s lives are purely private lives, revolving round their own jobs, their own families, their own love affairs. A writer who does not describe private life will not be able to describe them. The average well-to-do young man or woman who is the hero or heroine of nine novels out of ten is like this; Scott’s range does not include the hero and heroine of the average novel.
Again, only a limited proportion of tyeps vividly illustrate the historic past. Some of the most interesting do nothing of the kind. Philosophers do not, for instance, nor artists; their significant characteristic is to be found in the line they strike out for themselves, their independence of environment, not their connection with it. Scott’s great figures include no Levines and Bazarofs and Roderick Hudsons. Nor, for that matter, any Becky Sharps or Milly Theales or Major Pendennises; any cosmopolitans or adventurers or men of the world. There is no doubt, if you come to Scott expecting the sort of thing you find in Thackeray or Proust or Henry James, you will be disappointed.
V
But you will find a great deal else. With all his limitations Scott’s range is not a narrow one. And it takes in some ground that Thackeray and Proust and the rest of them never approach. That of the adventure story, for instance. Scott is not primarily a writer of adventure stories. But his themes, involving as they do conflicts between primitive characters in remote surroundings, entail that violent action, conspiracy, fight, escape, of which the adventure story is made. And with the adventurous incidents go the adventurous emotions: suspense, the heart high in the face of danger; the thrill felt when the knee is tense against the saddle girth, the sword hilt rough in the hand; the gambler’s exhilaration when all is staked on a chance and man’s wits are at their sharpest.
On another side Scott’s range extends to include ground usually thought peculiar to poetry. Man s relation to historic environment is a dry-sounding phrase, but it means romance — all that vast area of romance that is associated with time and place, the romance of ancient tales, of picturesque distant places, of buildings heavy with the weight of man’s history, of those wild places of the earth on which man, for all his history, has left no mark at all. It means all the emotions stirred in us by association, personal or historic, by a relic hallowed by connection with home or hero, by a stave of old song, a place loved in childhood, by any of the thousand frail, unbreakable ties of sentiment that bind us to the past.
These emotions it is that, at their most intense, give us a sense of the supernatural. We feel there must be some living power, working from the dead past or resident in inanimate matter, for such things to affect us so strongly. And Scott’s range includes the supernatural. His books are full of spectres and second sight and tutelary spirits: the omens that gather like monstrous birds of prey round the dying fortunes of the Ravenswood family; the bizarre, fateful dreams that mingle with fitful firelight and wind-stirred tapestry to torment the sleep of Lovell on his first night at Monkbarns; the unholy mirror of Damiotti the sorcerer; the Bodach Ghas foe of his house, even beyond death, that confronts Fergus Maclvor, shadowy and relentless, on the evening before his last battle.
Finally Scott’s range extends to a higher sphere of poetry to the tragic. This is rare in fiction. For tragedy, the most tremendous expression of literary art, aiming as it does at penetrating to the fundamental strata of man’s nature, exhibiting his ultimate capacities for good or evil, joy or sorrow, is only possible under two conditions. The characters with which it deals must be of a stature to exhibit these extreme capacities, and the situation in which they are involved must be big enough to call them forth. Othello is the pattern tragedy, because its hero and heroine are people of the highest virtue and emotional capacity, involved by a character of sublime wickedness in a situation so catastrophic that the issue can only be death.
Now most novelists have been concerned to portray the world they saw around them. And this world, Europe of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, has, with the exception of the semibarbarous country of Russia, achieved a degree of civilization in which spectacular crimes and catastrophes are confined to the criminal, degraded section of the community. You do not find figures of tragic stature there. It would be incredible nowadays that a heroic soldier like Othello and a flower of innocent sweetness like Desdemona should be the protagonists in a story of bloodthirsty jealousy culminating in murder. Nor, fortunately, is the average criminal a prince of the powers of darkness like Iago. So that modern novelists have had very little tragic material at their disposal. Of course there are exceptions. Tess of the D’Urbervilles is a true tragedy, for its heroine is a noble character involved, partly by her very nobility, in a terrible ruin. But Tesses are few and far between. Most modern tragedies are not true tragedies, for they are not about truly tragic characters. Mr. Dreiser’s American Tragedy, for example, is not a true tragedy, for the motives of his actors are so trivial, their natures so ignoble, that the emotion stirred in the reader is not tragic awe at man’s powers, but pitying disgust at his futility.
But Scott is in a very different position; his themes impose on him no such handicap. The struggle between rival loyalties, between loyalty and personal feeling, implacable revenge for an ancient wrong pursued through life, unavailing remorse for an ancient crime — these subjects involve both violent and catastrophic action and also some of man’s highest motives and intensest passions. They are the essential stuff of which tragedy is made — not so much the complex tragedy of Shakespeare and the great dramatists, but the simpler, heroic tragedy of epic and saga and ballad.
As a matter of fact Scott’s subject matter altogether is very much that of epic, saga, and ballad — far more than it is that of the ordinary novel. The authors of the Song of Roland, the Tale of the Volsungs, Chevy Chase, do not concern themselves with private life. They write of loyalty and patriotism and the obligations of honor, of legends and heroes, of ghostly premonitions and the romance of the sword. This is their range — as it is Scott’s; it is this we must expect to find when we open his books. It is surely enough to find in any single novelist.
VI
And he was peculiarly equipped to do justice to it. Like his range, his genius has its limitations. The fabric of its expression is very loosely woven, its detail perfunctory and conventional, while his carelessness and inequality are remarkable even among the careless, unequal writers of England. But he is built on the grand scale. His powerful, negligent grasp can control huge masses of heterogeneous material. If he sometimes does easy things badly, he often does difficult things well; and what he does well he does with ease. He has incomparable force and breadth and flexibility and resource. Nor do his carelessness, his conventionality, spoil his effects. His personality assimilates them, his vitality surmounts them. With his broad brush he paints on, never stopping to correct a mistake, smudging in any stock formula of stormy sky or fluttering curtain for background; but the result has certainty and individuality and vitality which make the work of more careful craftsmen look as lifeless as a waxwork.
He had his special gifts, too. For one thing, he can tell a story. This is an advantage to any novelist; but to Henry James, let us say, not a preeminent advantage. For not more than a third of a Henry James novel is story; the rest is analysis and description. At least three fift hs of a Scott novel, on the other hand, is story. If that is dull and confused, three fifths of the book is dull and confused.
It cannot be said that Scott is never dull. His story-telling is as unequal as everything else about him. The action is often very long getting under way; for whole pages the unfortunate reader of The Monastery lies becalmed on an ocean of topographical description and historical reminiscence, with not the skimpiest sail of a plot in sight. But no one can begin a book better, if he tries, than Scott: the first chapter of Guy Manncring, with its lonely rider lost on the unfriendly moor at nightfall; or the panorama of eighteenth-century Edinburgh, tavern and dark alley murmurous with discontent and threat of bloodshed, which introduces us to The Heart of Midlothian; or the quieter but not less effective opening of Rob Roy, bitter decorous dispute over the fireside, and Mr. Osbaldistone, that magnificent Raeburn figure, with his energetic countenance and his contemptuous manner — how these stimulate the curiosity and compel the attention and set the imagination aflame. And it is rare if it is not still burning on the last page.
It hardly matters if the effect is produced with intractable, wooden characters, improbable incidents, and lengthy periods of inaction. Scott can get more tension out of a face at the window than most novelists out of twenty hairbreadth escapes, more of the thrill of combat out of a pistol in the saddlebag than most modern writers out of all the high explosives that kept the world quiet on the Western Front. Rob Roy’s interview with Baillie Nicol Jarvie in the Tolbooth consists of nothing but fourteen pages of semihumorous conversation, yet Monte Cristo itself contains no scene more exciting; until the final moment when Rob has disappeared into the shadows of the Edinburgh street, we are on tenterhooks. Nor is this effect produced by any Kiplingesque sleight of hand in the telling — cunningly worked-out climax, artfully omitted inessentials. Scott proceeds as straightforward and leisurely, with as little fear of digression and expansion, as Shahrazad herself. Indeed, his art is the art of Shahrazad. He is not so much one of the first of novelists as the last representative of the old lost art of storytelling.
VII
Closely associated with his narrative gift is his pictorial power. This too is particularly useful for his purpose. The novel of action, unlike the novel of analysis, is made up of pictures; its crises are always visible events. Scott is better able to make us see them than any other English novelist except Hardy. His method is not at all like Hardy’s. Not more than Kipling’s narrative dexterity has he Hardy’s power to make a scene vivid by an arresting, unusual image — the road across Egdon Heath ‘like the parting in a head of black hair,’ the ceiling stained with Alec D’Urberville’s blood, ‘like a great ace of hearts.’ Scott’s similes are conventional, his epithets vague and commonplace; he would most likely have said that ‘the road showed white against the sombre verdure of the moor,’ described the ceiling as ‘stained with a ghastly and sanguinary red.’ Yet he makes us see his scenes as clearly as Hardy does.
The scene, independent of the peculiar moral interest and personal danger which attended it, had, from the effect of the light and shade on the uncommon objects which it exhibited, an appearance emphatically dismal. The light in the fire-grate was the dark-red glare of charcoal in a state of ignition, relieved from time to time by a transient flame of a more vivid or duskier light, as the fuel with which Dirk Hatteraick fed his fire was better or worse fitted for his purpose. Now a dark cloud of stifling smoke rose up to the roof of the cavern and then lighted into a reluctant and sullen blaze, which flashed wavering up the pillar of smoke, and was suddenly rendered brighter and more lively by some drier fuel, or perhaps some splintered fir-timber, which at once converted the smoke into flame. By such fitful irradiation, they could see, more or less distinctly, the form of Hatteraick, whose savage and rugged cast of features, now rendered yet more ferocious by the circumstances of his situation, and the deep gloom of his mind, assorted well with the rugged and broken vault, which rose in a rude arch over and around him. The form of Meg Merrilies, which stalked about him, sometimes in the light, sometimes partially obscured in the smoke and darkness, contrasted strongly with the sitting figure of Hatteraick as he bent over the flame, and from his stationary posture was constantly visible to the spectator, while that of the female flitted around, appearing and disappearing like a spectre.
‘Dark cloud,’ ‘rugged and broken vault,’ a figure ’like a spectre’ — are not these the cliches of description worn threadbare in a thousand novels? Yet what words could be more visualizing? Scott himself has seen the scene he is describing; and as we listen to him we see it. By the sheer strength and certainty of his imaginative vision he has galvanized the well-worn phrases into fresh and vivid life. The cliche has become the mot juste.
To recall his books is to recall a gallery of such pictures. Waverley crouching in the dark on the edge of the English camp, the firelight on the sentries’ regimentals glinting through the furze; Sir Arthur Wardour and Dousterswivel shrinking panic-stricken on the moon-checkered pavement of the ruined abbey; Wandering Willie with his dog and his doxy found making music that sunny, windy day in a sheltered nook of the links of Solway.
Scott’s set descriptions of landscape and interior are less effective. Apart from anything else, they are much too long. And here we do feel the need of more precise phrase, more arresting detail. It needs the movement of human beings to bring the stock formulas to life. Immobile and uninhabited, these ‘pleasant slopes’ and ‘awful prospects’ and ‘richly-decorated apartments’ are altogether too vague to call up any clear picture before the mind’s eye. Even here, though, Scott will now and again startle the reader by a splendid success. How magnificently vivid is the description of the sunset before the great storm in The Antiquary!
The sun was now resting his huge disk upon the edge of the level ocean, and gilded the accumulation of towering clouds through which he had travelled the livelong day, and which now assembled on all sides, like misfortunes and disasters around a sinking empire, and falling monarch. Still, however, his dying splendour gave a sombre magnificence to the massive congregation of vapours, forming out of their unsubstantial gloom the show of pyramids and towers, some touched with gold, some with purple, some with a hue of deep and dark red. The distant sea, stretched beneath this varied and gorgeous canopy, lay almost portentously still, reflecting back the dazzling and level beams of the descending luminary, and the splendid colouring of the clouds amidst which he was setting. Nearer to the beach, the tide rippled onward in waves of sparkling silver, that imperceptibly, yet rapidly, gained upon the sand.
Here the formal, generalized diction is a positive gain; it invests the whole scene with a sort of ominous majesty exquisitely in tone with the situation. Nor is our attention diverted from the object described, as it sometimes is in the descriptions of more brilliant writers like Stevenson, by admiration for the apt epithets and original similes used to describe it.
VIII
But the novelist stands or falls, not by description and narrative (alone, these two powers can do no more than mildly entertain us), but always and only by his power to create character. Now Scott’s talent for character drawing is of a piece with the rest of his talents — simple and straightforward, without strangeness or subtlety. He does not explore the obscurities of human motive, like George Eliot, or of human consciousness, like Proust. We look in vain in his great figures for those minute, revealing strokes of nature that vitalize the characters of Tolstoy or Jane Austen. But, though simple, he is not superficial. He draws the broad essential outlines of character with unsurpassed clearness and force, and he has the novelist’s first virtue — the mysterious, irreplaceable power of making his creatures live.
And they comprise all sorts of characters. His range had its limitations, as we have seen; but within those limitations it is inexhaustible. Scott’s living people come from the North Country; they do not come from the highest society. But these are their only common attributes. They cannot be grouped into categories. We do not find them reappearing in different books under different names, as we do Thackeray’s or Hardy’s. Sturdy Dandie Dinmont; respectable, adventurous Baillie Jarvie; Andrew Fairservice, with his eye to the main chance and his strict religious views; long-winded, short-tempered, kindly Jonathan Oldbuck; Glossin with his sly eyes; Dumbiedikes, that silent lover; goodnatured, hot-tempered Bucklaw; that ghastly figure of Elspeth of the Craigburnfoot,; the two Headriggs; Dalgetty; Meg Merrilies — these are only a few of the hundred that crowd upon the memory, face upon face, in endless vista, all different and all living.
In his actual method of presenting them he is not an innovator. His great figures are in that tradition of character that dominates English letters from Fielding to Dickens. Scott had learned his trade in their school; and, though he revealed human nature against a new background, he saw no reason to depart from their instruction in his actual method of depicting it. Like his masters, he drew man clear as print, solid as a brick, with every individual characteristic emphasized to the point of caricature. The mists may swirl round their heads, castle and crag rise sublime at their backs, the characters themselves are the matter-of-fact, beeffed descendants of Roderick Random and Tom Jones.
Like those of Fielding and Dickens and Smollett, all his great characters have their grotesque and some their comic side. His comedy is less edged and terse and sparkling than theirs, more like that of Hardy or of the Shakespeare that was their common master, the Shakespeare who created Shallow and Silence and Juliet’s nurse; a massive, leisurely, genial, shrewd humor, the humor of the countryman close-woven with traditional tale and homely racy saw and rural illustration. Frank Osbaldistone interrupts Fairservice, the Presbyterian gardener, struck with fear by the dark figures of the Jacobite agents seen lurking at night in the Hall garden: —
As I approached the mansion of the sapient Andrew, I heard a noise, which being of a nature peculiarly solemn, nasal, and prolonged, led me to think that Andrew, according to the decent and meritorious custom of his countrymen, had assembled some of his neighbours to join in family exercise, as he called evening devotion.
. . . The noise, however, when I listened to it more accurately, seemed to proceed entirely from the lungs of the said Andrew; and when I interrupted it by entering the house, I found Fairservice alone, combating as he best could with long words and hard names, and reading aloud, for the purpose of his own edification, a volume of controversial divinity. ‘I was just taking a spell,’said he, laying aside the huge folio volume as I entered, ' of the worthy Doctor Lightfoot.’
‘Lightfoot!’ I replied, looking at the ponderous volume with some surprise; ‘surely your author was unhappily named.’
‘Lightfoot was his name, sir; a divine he was and another kind of a divine than they hae now-a-days. Always, I crave your pardon for keeping ye standing at the door, but having been mistrysting (gude preserve us!) with ae bogle the night already, I was dubious o’ opening the yett till I had gaen through the e’ening worship; and I had just finished the fifth chapter of Nehemiah — if that winna gar keep their distance, I wotna what will.’
‘Trysted with a bogle,’ said I; ‘what do you mean by that, Andrew?’
‘I said mistrysted,’ replied Andrew; ‘that is as muckle as to say, fley’d wi’ a ghaist — gude preserve us say I again.’
‘Flay’d by a ghost, Andrew! how am I to understand that?’
‘I did not say flay’d,’ replied Andrew, ‘ but fley’d, that is, I got a gleg, and was ready to jump out o’ my skin, though naebody offered to whirl it aff my body as a man wad bark a tree.’
But his humorous characters are very seldom exclusively humorous, and here he divides sharply from Dickens and Fielding and the rest of them. Parson Adams, Mrs. Gamp, Commodore Trunnion, are always presented on one plane, the plane of comedy. They may achieve a moment of pathos, but it is impossible to think of them in a poetical or tragic mood. They would be as out of place as harlequin in Hamlet, and must either subdue their personality altogether or strike a painfully false note. They are not constructed to breathe except in their own comedy air. Scott’s similar characters are not so limited. Edie Ochiltree enters the scene as much a comic character as any of them, the sly beggar mocking the antiquary; but within a few chapters we have seen him confronting violent death, meditating fancifully on the scent of the wallflower sweet on the warm night air, rebuking two duelists in the high strain of a Hebrew prophet. Nor does his personality alter with his situation. Scott’s grasp on the essentials of character has a Shakespearean firmness that allows him to shift a figure through every vicissitude of circumstance without letting fall a particle of its individuality.
IX
Now such power over character is rare enough in any novelist, but it is especially rare in one who writes about the sort of subjects that Scott dealt with. If authors are interested in man’s relation to environment, they tend to subordinate the individual to the environment. Peasant life in Ireland, let us say, interests them; they wish to give a picture of it; and they use the individual characters as mere pegs on which to hang the picture. In the same way novelists who choose romantic themes are frequently more interested in the romance than in the characters. Their imagination has been caught by the romantic atmosphere of Nordic saga, for example; they wish to paint a picture that shall recapture it. And they, also, tend to treat the individual characters as pegs on which to hang their picture. The consequence for both sorts of author is that their figures are not individuals at all, but just stock types—the Irish peasant all brogue and blarney, the saga hero all war cry and winged helmet. So that as novels, as creations of new worlds of living people, their books are failures.
Not so Scott. He had an acute appreciation of individuality; as a distinguishing characteristic it comes only second to his sense of the past. In a measure it is prior to it. For the past is interesting to him primarily in so far as it elucidates the individual. He begins with the character, not with the environment or the atmosphere. He is interested in meetinghouse and castle and ballad for the light they shed on Edie Ochiltree, not in Edie Ochiltree for the light he shed on castle, ballad, and meetinghouse. In consequence we too think of Edie Ochiltree first of all as an individual. And the fact that he is drawn in the English tradition, the clear, solid, individualistic English tradition, makes us believe it all the more.
It is here that we come to the secret of Scott’s unique, peculiar greatness, the key to his puzzle, the figure in his carpet. That he can create living characters is enough to make him a great novelist. It is the apparently incongruous combination of his type of character and his type of theme that makes him different from other great novelists. He combines the substance of the realist with the fantasy of the romantic. He had a foot in two worlds and made the best of both of them.
(This study of Sir Walter Scott will be completed in the next issue with a second article, ‘ The Riddle of His Lost Reputation’)