Sir Walter Scott: Ii. The Riddle of His Lost Reputation
I
IT is generally unlucky for a writer to live in a time of literary transition. He cannot write with any conviction in the manner of the authors that have preceded him; on the other hand, the new age has not yet evolved the manner in which it is possible to write successfully. He falls between two stools. Such is the sad case of the poets between Chaucer and Spenser, of the dramatists between Fletcher and Wycherley; such is the sad case of almost every sort of writer to-day. But now and again there are exceptions to this rule. Of these the most striking example in English literature is Walter Scott.
He was a novelist brought up in the eighteenth-century tradition of Fielding and Smollett — rational, realistic, objective, with its homely, concrete characters and their homely, daylit atmosphere. But he grew up in the age of the Romantics, the age that rediscovered the significance of the irrational, unrealistic, subjective elements in human life — passion, natural beauty, the mysterious, irresistible influences of environment and the past. These things fired his imagination as much as they did that of his contemporaries; they gave him the themes for his books. But his novels did not lose the precious, irreplaceable reality of Fielding. For, however romantic the plot, the actors are drawn as solid and concrete as Tom Jones or Peregrine Pickle. It is Scott’s peculiar claim to fame that, alone of English novelists, he combined the substance of the realist with the imagination of the romantic; that he had a foot in two worlds and made the best of both of them.
Scott’s characters are not more vital than Fielding’s, but they touch life at many more points, reveal many more aspects of his experience. On the other hand, he gives the remote and the picturesque a substance not to be found in any other English novelist. We realize the influence of their surroundings on the people of the Lowlands all the more keenly when we feel that they are living individuals, not typical figures invented by the sociologist to illustrate his point. Adventures are much more thrilling when we feel they are happening to real people in real danger, not just to the jack-booted puppets of a boy’s Christmas gift book. Scott recovers the ballad spirit far more convincingly than most writers who have tried to do so; because we feel that, like the original ballad authors, he is first of all concerned with the story and the characters, and not just to create a romantic atmosphere. Above all, because he writes about real people, he is able to take advantage of his opportunities for tragedy.
For he does take advantage of them. With Hardy and Emily Brontë, he is our only tragic novelist. Alone but for them, he is of a stature to walk easily in a world of high action and high passion. But tragedy beyond all other forms must convince the reader that it speaks of real people. And since Scott is most real when he is dealing with his eighteenth-century, prosaic, semihumorous ‘ character parts,’ it is through these that he makes his tragic effects. He has his more conventional tragic types — Ravenswood, Glenallan; but they are not so real and therefore not so effective. It is with Meg Merrilies and Elspeth of the Craigburnfoot and the Deans family, with gypsies and farmers and fisher-folk drawn in his most concrete eighteenth-century manner, that Scott commands the demons of pity and terror.
And Scott’s tragedy is not less tragic from its association with such characters. Indeed, their flesh-and-blood solidity gives the added force of truth to their vicissitudes. We feel them to be no puppets of destiny shadowed by disaster from their entrance on the scene, but men and women with wills of their own; and it is in so far as a character is felt to have a will of its own that its struggle with fate has tragic tension. Besides, the motives of Scott’s characters are so remote from our own day, their circumstances so different, that unless the characters are made very realistic and prosaic and modern we should not believe in them at all. This is startlingly apparent in the trial scene from Waverley.
Fergus, as the presiding Judge was putting on the fatal cap of judgment, placed his own bonnet upon his head, regarded him with a steadfast and stern look, and replied in a firm voice, I cannot let this numerous audience suppose that to such an appeal I have no answer to make. But what I have to say, you would not bear to hear, for my defence would be your condemnation. Proceed, then, in the name of God, to do what is permitted to you. Yesterday, and the day before, you have condemned loyal and honourable blood to be poured forth like water. Spare not mine. Were that of all my ancestors in my veins, I would have peril’d it in this quarrel.’ . . .
Evan Maccombich looked at him with great earnestness, and, rising up, seemed anxious to speak; but the confusion of the court, and the perplexity arising from thinking in a language different from that in which he was to express himself, kept him silent. There was a murmur of compassion among the spectators, from the idea that the poor fellow intended to plead the influence of his superior as an excuse for his crime. . . .
‘I was only ganging to say, my lord,’ said Evan, in what he meant to be an insinuating manner, ‘that if your excellent honour, and the honourable Court, would let Vich Ian Vohr go free just this once, and let him gae back to France, and no to trouble King George’s government again, that ony six o’ the very best of his clan will be willing to be justified in his stead; and if you’ll just let me gae down to Glennaquoich, I’ll fetch them up to ye mysell, to head or hang, and you may begin wi’ me the very first man.’
Notwithstanding the solemnity of the occasion, a sort of laugh was heard in the court at the extraordinary nature of the proposal. The Judge checked this indecency, and Evan, looking sternly around, when the murmur abated, ‘If the Saxon gentlemen are laughing,’ he said, ‘because a poor man, such as me, thinks my life, or the life of six of my degree, is worth that of Vich Ian Vohr, it’s like enough they may be very right; but if they laugh because they think I would not keep my word, and come back to redeem him, I can tell them they ken neither the heart of a Hielandman, nor the honour of a gentleman.’
There was no farther inclination to laugh among the audience, and a dead silence ensued.
It needs a great effort of the sympathetic imagination for anyone living in 1932 genuinely to enter into the feelings of an eighteenth-century Highland chieftain about to die for the cause of legitimacy; nor does Fergus’s rotund eloquence make it any easier. We feel we are listening to an actor in a romantic melodrama, not to a real man in real danger of death. Evan’s sentiments, his savage clansman’s loyalty, are even further from our experience. But he is one of Scott’s realistic characters. And the moment he begins to speak the atmosphere changes. We are listening to a living man — there is no doubt about that now; and the fact that his sentiments and circumstances are so unlike anything we have known only gives his words an added and terrific poignancy. In such passages that union of imaginative theme and realistic method which is the secret of Scott’s glory achieves its highest triumph. As no other novelist can, not Conrad or Kipling or Stevenson, he can treat the heroic — make it living and solid and contemporary, and yet retain an epic simplicity and dignity.
II
These great effects are got by simple means. Scott was no analyst; he exhibits his characters solely by speech and action. And here we come to the last of his peculiar talents — his mastery of vernacular dialogue.
Taken as a whole, he is not one of the stylist novelists. He has a style; every paragraph he writes has that individual flavor which marks it as Scott’s. His narrative, too, moves with that elastic story-teller’s gusto he imparts to everything he touches: and at moments, in the superb last pages of The Bride of Lammermoor, for instance, it rises to a formal relentless majesty which is tremendously impressive. But no one would read one of his books — as they might read The House of the Seven Gables — for the style alone. His narrative writing is marked by all his customary inequality and carelessness. It never fits the sense like a glove; it has no felicity of phrase, no melodious, inevitable cadence. And the dialogue of his educated characters is much the same as his narrative. Indeed, if he is treading on ground that makes him nervous — a proposal of marriage, or a conversation between two young ladies of good family — he falls into a sort of agonized embarrassed gentleman’s stiltedness which is highly comic.
But, as usual, when he is dealing with the less highly born he is very different. Not that his vernacular dialogue is subtle or elaborate. He is the father of all that long array of writers who have explored the literary possibilities of patois. But he did not pursue his explorations as far as his children. The talk of his peasants is not thick-sown with flowers of speech like those of Synge, for instance. His images are simple, his illusions not recondite. However, this is not to his disadvantage; on the contrary, it is half his glory. For it means that his dialogue never fails, as Synge’s sometimes does, to perform its primary function; it is always subordinate to its speaker. Here once more Scott keeps his feet firmly fixed in both his worlds. We always feel his words to be the words of real men; and in consequence the beauty of them comes upon us with all the more effect.
For — and this is the second half of his glory — they are beautiful. Scott’s vernacular dialogue is style in its highest sense — every image apt, every cadence exact to follow the modulation of the speaker’s mood, yet never unmusical. He has achieved that rarest of literary triumphs, a form of speech which sounds perfectly natural and which is yet as expressive as poetry.
Even its common change has a poetic lilt and precision. ‘Now, lass, if ye like,’ says crazed Madge Wildfire,
‘ we’ll play them a fine jink; we will awa’ out and take a walk — they will make unco wark when they miss us, but we can easily be back by dinner time, or before dark night at ony rate, and it will be some frolic and fresh air.’ But of course it is the deeper feelings that give it a chance fully to reveal its capacities. As the emotion rises, so does the diction of the actors assume a proportionate intensity and elevation. Sometimes it bursts forth in a torrent of tragic eloquence. How magnificent are Meg Merrilies’s tirades, whether she curses those who turned her and her tribe homeless into the wilderness, —
‘Ride your ways,’said the gipsy, ’ride your ways, Laird of Ellangowan — ride your ways, Godfrey Bertram! This day have ye quenched seven smoking hearths — see if the fire in your ain parlour burn the blyther for that. Ye have riven the thack off seven cottar houses — look if your ain roof-tree stand the faster. — Ye may stable your stirks in the shealings at Derncleugh
— see that the hare does not couch on the hearthstane at Ellangowan. — Ride your ways, Godfrey Bertram — what do ye glower after our folk for? — There’s thirty hearts there that wad hae wanted bread ere ye had wanted sunkets, and spent their lifeblood ere ye had scratched your finger. Yes — there’s thirty yonder, from the auld wife of an hundred to the babe that was born last week, that ye have turned out o’ their bits o’ bields, to sleep with the tod and the black-cock in the muirs! Ride your ways, Ellangowan. — Our bairns are hinging at our weary backs — look that your braw cradle at hame be the fairer spread up
— not that I am wishing ill to little Harry, or to the babe that’s yet to be born — God forbid — and make them kind to the poor, and better folk than their father! — And now, ride e’en your ways; for these are the last words ye’ll ever hear Meg Merrilies speak, and this is the last reise that I ’ll ever cut in the bonny woods of Ellangowan,’ —
or, in gentler mood, bids a last farewell to that sequestered grove where she has spent some of the few quiet hours of her stormy life: —
She then moved up the brook until she tame to the ruined hamlet, where, pausing with a look of peculiar and softened interest before one of the gables which was still standing, she said in a tone less abrupt, though as solemn as before, ‘Do you see that blackit and broken end of a sheeling? — there my kettle boiled for forty years — there I bore tw elve buirdly sons and daughters — where are they nowr? — where are the leaves that were on that auld ash-tree at Martinmas! — the west wind has made it bare — and I’m stripped too. — Do you see that saugh-tree? — it’s but a blackened rotten stump now — I’ve sate under it mony a bonnie summer afternoon, when it hung its gay garlands ower the poppling water.—I’ve sat there, and,’ elevating her voice, ‘I’ve held you on my knee, Henry Bertram, and sung ye sangs of the auld barons and their bloody wars — It will ne’er be green again, and Meg Merrilies will never sing sangs mair, be they blythe or sad. But ye’ll no forget her, and ye’ll gar big up the auld wa’s for her sake? — and let somebody live there that’s ower gude to fear them of another warld — For if ever the dead came back amang the living, I ’ll be seen in this glen mony a night after these crazed banes are in the mould.’
III
In the mouths of the wild witch doctors of the Covenant, Scott’s diction forgets its homely origin and phrase and assumes a lofty Biblical tone.
‘Who talks of signs and wonders? Am I not Habakkuk Mucklewrath, whose name is changed to Magor-Missabib, because I am made a terror unto myself and unto all that are around me? — I heard it — When did I hear it? — Was it not in the Tower of the Bass, that overhangeth the wide wild sea? — And it howled in the winds, and it roared in the billows, and it screamed, and it whistled, and it clanged, with the screams and the clang and the whistle of the seabirds, as they floated, and flew, and dropped, and dived, on the bosom of the waters. I saw it — Where did I see it? Was it not from the high peaks of Dumbarton, when I looked westward upon the fertile land, and northward on the wild Highland hills; when the clouds gathered and the tempest came, and the lightnings of heaven flashed in sheets as wide as the banners of an host? — What did I see? — Dead corpses and wounded horses, the rushing together of battle, and garments rolled in blood. — What heard I? — The voice that cried, Slay, slay — smite — slay utterly — let not your eye have pity! slay utterly, old and young, the maiden, the child, and the woman whose head is grey — Defile the house and fill the courts with the slain!’
Not less stirring though more restrained is the rhetoric of Jeanie Deans pleading with Queen Caroline for her sister’s life: —
‘If it like you, madam,’ said Jeanie, ‘I would hae gaen to the end of the earth to save the life of John Porteous, or any other unhappy man in his condition; but I might lawfully doubt how far I am called upon to be the avenger of his blood, though it may become the civil magistrate to do so. He is dead and gane to his place, and they that have slain him must answer for their ain act. But my sister — my puir sister Effie, still lives, though her days and hours are numbered! She still lives, and a word of the King’s mouth might restore her to a brokenhearted auld man, that never, in his daily and nightly exercise, forgot to pray that his Majesty might be blessed with a long and a prosperous reign, and that his throne, and the throne of his posterity, might be established in righteousness. O, madam, if ever ye kend what it was to sorrow for and with a sinning and a suffering creature, whose mind is sae tossed that she can be neither ca’d fit to live or die, have some compassion on our misery! — Save an honest house from dishonour, and an unhappy girl, not eighteen years of age, from an early and dreadful death! Alas! it is not when we sleep soft and wake merrily ourselves that we think on other people’s sufferings. Our hearts are waxed light within us then, and we are for righting our ain wrangs and fighting our ain battles. But when the hour of trouble comes to the mind or to the body — and seldom may it visit your Leddyship — and when the hour of death comes, that comes to high and low — lang and late may it be yours — O, my Leddy, then it isna what we hae dune for oursells, but what we hae dune for others, that we think on maist pleasantly. And the thoughts that ye hae intervened to spare the puir thing’s life will be sweeter in that hour, come when it may, than if a word of your mouth could hang the haill Porteous mob at the tail of ae tow.’
But the opportunity for these tirades does not come very often. More generally Scott lets the note of tragic eloquence steal into his dialogue, imperceptibly and unexpectedly, as the throb of emotion steals into a voice. Edie Ochiltree, caught between cliff and racing tide, turns and faces death. ‘I hae lived to be weary of life,’ he cries, ‘and here or yonder — at the back o’ a dyke in a wreath o’ snaw, or in the wame o’ a wave what signifies how the auld gaberlunzie dies?’
Effie Deans, waiting death in prison, turns to her Bible.
‘See,’she said . . . ‘the book opens aye at the place o’ itsell, O see, Jeanie, what a fearfu’ scripture!’ . . . ‘He hath stripped me of my glory, and taken the crown from my head. He hath destroyed me on every side, and I am gone. And mine hope hath he removed like a tree.’ ‘Isna that ower true a doctrine?’ said the prisoner — ‘Isna my crown, my honour removed? And what am I but a poor wasted wan-thriven tree, dug up by the roots, and flung out to waste in the highway that man and beast may tread it under foot? I thought o’ the bonny bit thorn that our father rooted out o’ the yard last May, when it had a’ the flush o’ blossoms on it; and then it lay in the court till the beasts had trod them a’ to pieces wi’ their feet. I little thought, when I was wae for the bit silly green bush and its flowers, that I was to gang the same gate mysell.’
Scott’s finest strokes in this kind are shorter even than these — chance remarks, two or three words thrown off at the height of tragic tension. Listen once more to the beggar on the seashore. The sea is gaining; beside himself with terror, Sir Arthur Wardour implores him to think of a way of escape.
’Can you think of nothing — no help — I will make you rich — I will give you a farm — I’ll —' ’Our riches will soon be equal,’ said the beggar, looking out across the strife of the waters.
Elspeth of the Craigburnfoot, seated at the wake of her young grandson, herself so old after ninety years of crime and remorse that no one can make out if she realizes the occasion or no. According to the Scotch custom, wine is handed round.
Elspeth, as these refreshments were presented, surprised and startled the whole company by motioning to the person who bore them to stop; then, taking a glass in her hand she rose up, and, as the smile of dotage played upon her shrivelled features, she pronounced, with a hollow and tremulous voice, ‘Wishing a’ your healths, sirs, and often may we hae such merry meetings!’
Meg Merrilies, hurrying silently to the assignation that shall finally achieve the vengeance which for over twenty years has been her only preoccupation, stops at a clearing in the wood where, as she alone knows, the first of the guilty to suffer already lies buried.
She paused an instant beneath the tall rock . . . and stamped upon the ground, which, notwithstanding all the care that had been taken, showed vestiges of having been recently moved. ‘Here rests ane,’ she said, ‘he’ll maybe hae neibours sune.’
These last sentences are not to be quoted, for their force lies in their relation to what has gone before. Yet it is impossible adequately to praise Scott without quoting them. For in them his union of realism and imagination shows itself at its most concentrated. They are real with the unexpected inevitability of an actual event; it is as if the characters had for a moment become independent of their creator and were speaking of their own volition. But their words are touched by the imagination, to stir sublimer echoes. Their understated irony seems, as by a sort of divination, to reveal the situation in its more tremendous relation to the indifferent decrees of nature and destiny. They strike across the scene ‘like flashes of lightning discovering the perils of travellers among the Alps.’
The quotation is from Raleigh on Shakespeare. And with reason; for it is of the English tragic drama rather than of the English novel that Scott’s tragic eloquence reminds us. In real life, people are not able to express their deeper feelings adequately. And most novelists have made their characters as inarticulate as they would be in life. ‘Oh God!’ they cry, at moments of crisis — ‘ No ’ — ‘ Don’t ’ — ‘ You hurt me too much,’ endeavoring by these distraught monosyllables to convey the storms of fear and woe raging in their hearts. It is the peculiar art of the tragic poet to translate these incoherent feelings into adequate words. And, though he is careful to maintain the illusion of natural speech, so is it also the peculiar art of Scott. As he is one of the few tragic novelists, so from his solid eighteenth-century characters we hear what we hear from no others save those in Wuthering Heights, the authentic voice of tragic poetry.
IV
Tragic poetry, vivid pictures, epic emotion, living people, the best of realistic and romantic — here certainly is ground enough for Scott’s contemporary reputation. Only — one wonders— why has he lost it? Why are people not reading him as much as they read Dickens or Jane Austen?
Alas, his spectacular merits are counterbalanced by equally spectacular defects. All his qualities are the creative qualities, the qualities of art. And the creative qualities, though they are the first essential to a great writer, are not the only ones necessary to his complete success. They ensure that the material he is writing about shall be the true stuff of which art is made. But in order that this material should be presented to its full advantage, he needs the critical qualities, the qualities of craft. And these Scott possessed as little as any writer who has ever lived.
The period in which he wrote was, of course, not one that exacted a high standard of craft in the novel. But Scott would have been a bad craftsman in any period. He understood neither the laws governing the novel in general nor the particular capacities and limitations of his own genius in particular. And besides, laziness or modesty or exuberance, or all three together, had made him careless. ‘Style,’ he is reported to have said to an admirer who asked him about the principles which guided the practice of this branch of his art, ‘ Style — I never think about style. I have had regiments of cavalry marching through my head ever since I was fourteen.’
It is a charming answer. But it revealed an attitude well-nigh disastrous to him. The goddess of art is not thus gayly to be mocked. Scott’s words meant, to begin with, that he was liable to fall into the most fatal error on the part of the creative artist — to write outside his range. If only a certain range of his experience has this power to stimulate a writer’s imagination, it is clear that he should stay within it. The faultless craftsmen — Turgenev, Jane Austen — always do, and the consequence is that they practically never make a failure. There are a great many things that they cannot write about; but they do not write about them, so it does not matter. Within their limits they are consistently successful. Scott, ignorant of his talent and therefore of his range, imposed no deliberate limits on his subject matter — with the result that a great deal of his work was just wasted.
He spent a great deal of time, for instance, in writing whole books of which he could never have made a success — stories about distant periods of the world’s history, the age of Richard I or Louis XI or sixteenthcentury Germany. One can quite understand why he did. These periods fired his imagination, ever sensitive to the appeal of the past. He longed to reconstruct them. But to reconstruct a living world, not from one’s own experience, but only from what one has read about it in the records of other people’s experience, is pretty well impossible. The very fact that its picturesqueness appeals to you shows that you do not see it as its inhabitants did. And if you do not see it as its inhabitants did, how can you reconstruct it as it really looked? As a matter of fact, with a few freak exceptions, there are no conscientiously accurate historical novels that convey the effect of a living world in the sense that Anna Karenina or Middlemarch does. The novels about past periods that do give an effect of life, The Three Musketeers or The Scarlet Letter, are not serious reconstructions at all, but fantasies and romances set in the past because the author felt that a modern realistic setting was incongruous to their spirit.
But Scott is not a fantastic writer. He was interested in the past, because of the light it threw on real men living in the world of fact. His range of reality was, as we have seen, the country of his birth as it appeared within the memory of living people. And in consequence, though, like everything he wrote, they have vivid scenes and a fine narrative gusto, as serious novels Ivanhoe and the rest of them are failures.
V
This would not have mattered so much if he had only written outside his range in a certain specified type of novel. But he is equally liable to do it anywhere. His limitations are not only of place or period, but of character and theme; and even if he is writing of Scotland in the eighteenth or nineteenth century, he often trespasses on alien ground.
It is partly due to the second major defect in which his critical incapacity involved him — his lack of sense of form. A sense of form is the craftsman’s first virtue. It means the power to understand the true nature of one’s inspiration; and with the result to construct a fitting frame through which to express it. Now, in the first place, Scott did not conceive a novel as a whole at all. His books did not make that first appearance in his mind, as they did in that of Henry James, as unities of which the various episodes and characters were to emerge later and gradually, as contributory elements. No; as he said, they marched in like regiments — brilliant, disorderly, uncontrolled regiments of people and incidents. And he then imposed an artificial unity on them by means of a plot constructed for the purpose. Sometimes he thought it out carefully, sometimes he just made it up as he went along. This in itself would prevent his books from moving with that inevitability which characterizes the works of masters of form.
For the plot has no organic connection with the novel’s inspiration. Scott was inspired to write The Antiquary, as he himself tells us, by his vision of the tragic possibilities inherent in Scottish peasant life and speech. The plot turns on the matrimonial projects of Lovell. It is not a very interesting plot. But, indeed, Scott’s plots, invented merely to serve as pegs and not for their own intrinsic interest, seldom are. They are just perfunctory rehashes of the conventional novel plot of his day, with a hero and a heroine and an intrigue, hastily rounded off with a marriage.
The first fatal result of this was that he was involved in writing on all sorts of subjects outside his range — high life; characters needing a complex analysis to make them clear; above all, sex, with its inevitable corollary, the romantic heroine. There is hardly one of the Waverley Novels in which we do not groan to find forcibly imprisoned there by the plot a lifeless bundle of perfections called the heroine — Rose Bradwardine, Julia Mannering, Rowena, Lucy Ashton, Isabella Wardour, or whatever the particular name may be. ‘Charming girls,’ as Admiral Croft said of the Miss Musgraves. ‘I can scarcely tell one from the other.’
If for once Scott does attempt to endow a heroine with a little more individuality, the moment that she is called upon to perform her function and take part in a love scene she turns to sawdust and copy-book sentiment. Diana Vernon is a charming, spirited sketch on her first appearance, brighteyed and willful-haired, galloping over the Cheviots. But listen to her refusing a proposal of marriage. ‘This is folly, this is madness. Hear me, sir; and curb this unmanly burst of passion. . . . To me these raptures are misapplied — they only serve to prove a further necessity for your departure and that without delay.’ Only in Jeanie Deans has Scott found a heroine whose station and situation give full scope to his talents.
Nor are the general run of Scott’s heroes much better than the heroines. Impeccable, incredible, indistinguishable young men — Frank Osbaldistone, Henry Morton, Lovell — what evil spirit has conjured you from the hairdresser’s window which is your true home? No need to ask. The answer is only too plain — the plot, the wretched, exigent, conventional plot.
VI
It is responsible for other defects as well. One of the first rules of the novel is that the emphasis of form should fall in the same place as the emphasis of interest, that the characters and episodes where the author’s imagination is burning brightest shall be the most important characters and episodes in the plot. But since Scott has imagined them both separately and with very little reference to each other, as often as not the contrary happens. The emphasis of the plot is, as it were, always pulling against the emphasis of the interest.
Scott’s most memorable characters are minor characters, his most thrilling incidents irrelevant to the main theme. These human characters, living as those of Fielding, are elbowed out of their natural place of preëminence by puppets whose names we forget as we shut the book; these scenes vivid as Hardy’s, tragic moments equal to Emily Brontë’s, have to fit themselves in as minor episodes. We remember Old Mortality for Cuddie Headrigg and Balfour of Burley; but the action turns on Morton and Edith Bellenden. Who thinks of Julia Mannering and Harry Bertram when they recall the story of Meg Merrilies and Dandie Dinmont?
I know that when I was a child, and Scott was the only classic author I had read, I took for granted that the interesting characters in a novel were subsidiary characters. I could hardly believe my eyes when I turned to JaneEyre and found that in the works of some eccentric authors they were the hero and heroine.
And as the result of this dual emphasis Scott, except in a few unrepresentative cases like The Bride of Lammermoor, is cut off from the use of all those important weapons of the story-teller that come from the right incident occurring in the right place — varied tension, telling high light, gradually accumulated emotion, climax. He is, indeed, an expert in anticlimax. The most exciting incidents may occur at the beginning of the book; the catastrophe, to which the whole plot leads up, be as flat as a pancake. Scott springs his most thrilling scenes upon us, his most brilliant descriptions, highest flights of tragic eloquence, anywhere and without preparation; if they make their effect, it is by sheer intrinsic imaginative force, against the grain of the story. He is like an athlete who jumps without taking any run beforehand. His agility is so great that he often succeeds; but sometimes he does not. And anyway, if he had taken a run, he would not have needed to make such an effort .
Finally, his lack of form means that his work has no proper proportion. Sometimes — in Waverley, for example — he will take sixteen chapters in getting started; it is as if we advanced up a huge flight of steps only to find a small building at the top. In The Heart of Midlothian, on the other hand, he goes on for a whole volume after the story is over. Indeed, he never knows when to stop. And as often as not he will linger the longest over his dullest and most uninspired passages. It may be because they are necessary to the plot; as, for instance, that vast cumbrous machinery of intrigue that clutters up the first half of Rob Roy. But sometimes they have not even that excuse. They are just padding. And the worst of padding is that, besides being dull in itself, it weakens the force of the good passages concealed within it. The mind, dulled by the effort to attend to what wearies it, will not respond to what should be its delight. With Elizabethan merits Scott has Elizabethan faults. Like them he buries his jewels of humor and beauty beneath piles of slipshoddiness and conventionality.
VII
The consequence of all this is that Scott’s genius never found its true fulfillment. He is the most variously gifted of all English novelists. He is the father of all historical novelists, all the novelists who concern themselves with local characters, all romancers; he is one of the greatest masters of the English humorist tradition; he is almost the only English novelist who inherits also that great lost tradition of English tragic poetry. But he never wrote a single consistently successful novel.
Even if he manages to avoid one of his usual pitfalls, it is only to fall into another. The Bride of Lammennoor, for example, has, for once, an excellent and well-constructed plot. And with what overpowering effect does it move to its awful culmination! But the central action turns on love — and passionate love at that. It needed a sentiment of fiery strength to override the inherited enmity between Ravenswood and the Ashtons. Scott makes it as tame as the loves of the plants. And in consequence the book, magnificent as it is, leaves us feeling as though we had listened to a piece of music in which an important note in the scale had not been sounded.
Redgauntlet and The Antiquary, on the other hand, do keep pretty well within Scott’s range; in them the sentimental interest, though not expelled, is driven into a very small corner. But their plots are very dull and very complicated; and neither has any organic unity at all. Indeed, The Antiquary changes the centre of its interest halfway through the book.
Perhaps Guy Mannering is the most successful, as a whole, as it is certainly the most brilliant in parts. It opens splendidly and culminates in a most thrilling climax. But it, too, is full of unnecessary incidents and wooden characters, while the correspondence between the two young ladies is surely the most unconvincing attempt at female impersonation with which even Scott has ever seen fit to regale his readers: it shows up against the breathing vividness of the peasant and gypsy scenes as lifeless and lustreless as a wax flower in a herbaceous border.
Except in his briefest flights, Wandering Willie’s Tale and the wonderful little story of The Two Drovers, Scott has never achieved perfection. And he has been punished for it. His treasures of poetry and passion lie as often as not unrecognized in their dull museum of amorphous and conventional romance. It may be that in consequence his fulllength novels, even the best of them, will never again find readers, except among those who are prepared to delve and sift.
Yet those who are prepared will never close these books dissatisfied. For, in spite of all the faults, the merits are of so unique, so majestic a kind that they are sufficient in themselves to place Scott almost alone of English writers in the narrow aristocracy of the world’s novelists. Ben Jonson said of Donne that he was the first poet in the world in some things; so we may say of Scott that he was the first novelist in the world in some things. And even round his worst work hovers the hint of a careless greatness.