as think, may safely be asserted, that the Waverleys as to their subject-matter, whole story still remains, even at this time of day, enveloped in considerable mystery; and that, if the authorities on which Scott relied are not to be implicitly believed, the tale they tell, however its credit may have been shaken, has never been absolutely disproved. If a romance writer is not justified in choosing from a mass of contradictory materials such as suit his purpose best, there is an end of the historical novel altogether, from which, however, in the hands of a genius like Scott, we imbibe the spirit, as distinct from the letter, of the past more faithfully than from professional chroniclers. Sir Walter admits that he has purposely painted Leicester less black than contemporary opinion would have warranted, because close adherence to it would have made a character too disgustingly wicked to be useful for the purposes of fiction." Finally, we may say that no writer of fiction, whether in poetry or prose, whether dramatist or novelist, is bound to know more of past events than those who were contemporary with them; nor, in the treatment of historical characters, to go beyond the current opinion of the age in which they lived. To make a novel or romance the vehicle for introducing to the public "the real" Queen This, or "the real" Lord That, would be absurd. This process of rehabilitation, which is generally rather a failure, is certainly not the province of the historical novelist. If we see his characters as those who knew them saw them, we need ask no more. Nor is it of course necessary that all should have seen them from the same point of view. We can no more expect to find unanimity among our ancestors on such subjects than among ourselves. If the novelist has the skill to blend together in his characters the various traits recorded of them by friends and foes respectively, so that they do not contradict each other, he will probably produce an honest likeness, though not exactly the same as would be found in any contemporary limner. and such the general characteristics of each section, we have now to regard them from a different point of view, they illustrate the different qualities of Scott's genius, under what we may call, for brevity's sake, the two heads of Tragedy and Comedy, though comedy is too narrow a term to express all that we mean when we refer to Scott's humor. Opinions will differ as to the finest scenes in the Waverleys; but of the fifteen or twenty which could be named as worthy of the rank here assigned to them, there are some to which nobody would refuse it who was capable of experiencing the feelings to which tragedy appeals. It is difficult to say whether Scott is more successful in those touching scenes which can hardly be read without tears, or in such as affect us with sensations of awe and horror. He has produced masterpieces of both kinds; and it is unnecessary to decide between them. We wish only to point out what seems occasionally to be forgotten, that in Scott we have not merely a great novelist, but a tragedian of the first class, whose rank is equal to that of the great Elizabethan dramatists, and scarcely inferior to the greatest of them. We should feel guilty of some impertinence towards the public if we entered on any proof of this assertion by quoting the passages which might be cited in support of it. But we shall perhaps be pardoned for recalling to the memory of our readers a few of the most striking scenes. In "Guy Mannering," for instance, we will refer to three of them. The first shall be the loss of the child Bertram; the second, the recognition of him in the house of Colonel Mannering, when he returns from abroad after an absence of seventeen years; the third, the death of Meg Merrilies, and her dying appeal to Dirk Hatteraick to confess the truth. One of the peculiar powers possessed by Sir Walter Scott, through which the poet is revealed to us in the novelist, is the art of representing nature as in harmony with the tone of feeling which Such being the classification of the he wishes to produce. This is not quite the same thing as the pathetic | He appears as her champion at the last fallacy, though it borders on it; and moment, but in no plight for battle. the effect of it on the first of the scenes The trumpets sound, the knights meet to which we are referring, is most striking. The wretched father and his servants are wandering about the woods and the wild seacoast, in search of the missing boy whom his parents are never to see again. in full career, and Ivanhoe and his horse go down together. Yet, though scarcely touched by his adversary's lance, the Templar falls from his saddle. Ivanhoe commands him to yield on pain of instant death; but he answers nothing. 66 The evening had begun to close in when the parties entered the wood and dispersed "Slay him not, Sir Knight," cried the different ways in quest of the boy and his Grand Master, unshriven and unabcompanion. The darkening of the atmo-solved; kill not body and soul! We allow sphere and the hoarse sighs of the Novem-him vanquished." He descended into the ber wind through the naked trees, the lists, and commanded them to unhelm rustling of the withered leaves which the conquered champion. His eyes were strewed the glades, the repeated halloos of the different parties which often drew them together in expectation of meeting the object of their search, gave a cast of dismal sublimity to the scene. What a perfect picture of gloom and desolation, rife with vague suggestions of mysterious danger and impending calamity, attuning the mind to the dreadful discovery to follow! closed; the dark red flush was still on his brow. As they looked on him in astonishment, the eyes opened, but they were fixed and glazed. The flush passed from his brow, and gave way to the pallid hue of death. Unscathed by the lance of his enemy, he had died a victim to the violence of his own passions. "This is indeed the judgment of God," said the Grand Master, looking upwards. Fiat voluntas tua !" Fully equal to the description of the The summit of Scott's tragic power last moments of Meg Merrilies is the is reached no doubt in "The Bride of terrible death scene in "The Anti-Lammermoor." Pity and terror take quary " where Elspeth, after making confession of that tragic tale of crime and sorrow which had destroyed one young life and ruined another, falls down dead when pressed to repeat it by Monkbarns and Ochiltree. Other passages no less powerful than those referred to above may be found in "Old Mortality " and "Ivanhoe." Can any reader of Scott have forgotten the position of Henry Morton in the farmhouse immediately after the battle of Bothwell Brigg, when he falls into the hands of the Whig fanatics, who are about to murder him, or the death of the Templar in the lists of Templestowe ? We must assume on the part of our readers a full knowledge of the Templar's passion for Rebecca; of the fearful pressure he had placed upon himself to appear as the champion of the Temple against any one who might appear on her behalf; of the tender feeling with which she had learned to regard Ivanhoe; and of the sick-bed from which he had risen to defend her. possession of us on the threshold. The passion of revenge works out its own punishment through a series of events, each springing out of the other by natural and easy processes, and leading up to, without anticipating, the catastrophe. The ruined heir of an ancient house, whose fierce and vindictive temper is rendered all the more striking by his youth and noble bearing, seeks out the enemy of his family under the gloomy oaks which surround the lost mansion of his forefathers. With the purpose of assassination in his mind, if not finally resolved upon, he meets his mortal foe in company with a beautiful girl of eighteen, and in a moment of deadly peril saves the lives of both. But on the spot where he had meditated the doom of another he meets his own. Lucy, whom ere long he learns to love and who loves him in return, becomes at once the cause of his destruction and the innocent victim of his ill-starred affection. Had he never gone out with murderous designs against the father, he would With these few exceptions, Scott never have seen the daughter. But for places the passion of love as he places the alarm which he inspired in Sir the passion of loyalty, in juxtaposition William Ashton, he had never been with other considerations by which it his guest; had never been betrothed at should be tempered and regulated, and the mermaiden's well; or brought an the effect of his workmanship is to untimely end upon himself, or a ghastly show that characters in which these death on the unhappy young lady who emotions are kept within certain limits lost her reason when forced into mar- may be just as interesting and even riage with his rival. romantic as those in which they run wild. Is not Lord Evandale, for instance, just as interesting a character as Claverhouse ? Is not the whole story of his luckless passion for Edith From pity and terror we pass to the Bellenden as romantic and as touching passion of love. In Scott's treatment as any tale of true love that minstrel of it we find the same remarkable com- ever wove? Yet Lord Evandale's loybination which we have noticed in his alty to the Stewarts, though true to handling of historical subjects. Love the death, did not blind him to the If we accept Aristotle's definition of the true end of tragedy, who can refuse to Scott a place among its greatest masters? is not lord of all; he has his place; but he must listen to reason. A young lady with a well-regulated mind is not, in the hands of Scott, either dull, or prudish, or uninteresting. She may possess all respectable virtues, yet be as lively, as piquant, and as tender as if she were totally devoid of them. The three heroines who had them not - Amy Robsart, Effie Deans, and Clara Mowbray -all came to an unhappy end. Mr. Lang points out that Lockhart has made a mistake in his account of Scott's alteration of the plot of "St. Ronan's Well," according to which the marriage of Clara with Valentine Bulmer did not in his own words end at the church door. But this was not the particular indecorum which scandalized John Ballantyne. What Scott had really represented in the original manuscript was that Clara had already gone astray with her actual lover, Francis Tyrrel, whom she supposed herself to be marrying, when she gave her hand in the dark to his halfbrother. The entanglement thus created was the basis of an excellent plot; and that this is what Scott meant is shown by the passage in which Clara speaks to Tyrrel of their present misery as the reward of "sin." But, taking her as she is, Clara Mowbray is an eminently interesting character, and her death is equal in pathos to anything that Scott has written. justice of listening to well-founded or It was this almost extinct race which | of, nothing that makes him different Scott loved to reproduce as a kind of from the rest of the world. The same sacred duty; the "folks of the old may be said of Miss Grizzle Oldbuck, a leaven," with all their hereditary perfect portrait, but in whom probably prejudices and generous principles, neither Miss Becky Blattergrowl, nor with all their ancient Scottish manners Mrs. Mucklebackit, nor Miss Wardour and customs, with all their old Scot- herself, saw anything odd or unusual. tish faith, hospitality, worth, and Mowbray in "St. Ronan's Well" has honor. To give us pictures of this been too much overlooked. The vulsociety was as much his object as to garity, vanity, and overweening selfunfold before us the great political and importance which we see in him at military panorama of the seventeenth first, overlying the instincts of a gentleand eighteenth centuries. But old man which still survive underneath Scottish manners did not survive among and peep out by degrees as we become the Jacobites only. Of the seven prin- better acquainted with him, and the cipal novels dealing with Scottish life brotherly affection struggling hard with and character in the eighteenth cen- the temptations to which he is exposed tury, only four-the "Black Dwarf," by his pecuniary difficulties, form a "Rob Roy," "Waverley," and "Red- combination which Scott has not often gauntlet " -are founded on the Stewart attempted, and makes us wish that he cause. The "Heart of Midlothian" had. Nor must we omit Colonel Mandoes not refer to it at all, and in "Guy nering, a man of marked idiosyncrasy, Mannering" and "The Antiquary "we with many contrasts in his character, only just catch a glimpse of it, like the all exhibited without harshness last gleam of the setting sun as he abruptness, so that what he does tosinks beneath the horizon. Sir Arthur day always seems just what we should Wardour still drinks the health of the have expected him to do, though the king over the water in the year 1798; opposite perhaps of what he did yesand among the relics of old Miss Ber- terday. If asked beforehand, we should tram is found a promissory note from certainly not have said that he was at the nonjuring clergyman, and a new all likely to enter into the game of high set of words to the old tune of "Over jinks as he did when first introduced to the Water to Charlie." It is right to Mr. Pleydell; yet when he does it it add that the nonjuring clergyman has seems the most natural thing in the paid up the interest punctually. world. The successful soldier, full of self-reliance, who resents the proposal that he should have a guard of soldiers at his house, on the ground that he has always been considered competent to take care of his own family, yet is terribly afraid of being laughed at because he follows the advice given him by the gipsy woman, is still the same man. We doubt whether sufficient credit has been allowed to Scott for characters of this description; and, if we are right, he himself is partly to blame for it by the well-known comparison which he instituted between himself and Miss Austen and Miss Ferrier. But, to our thinking, neither of these ladies, nor Fielding, nor Richardson, can give away much to the painter of Guy Mannering and John Mowbray. They seem to show that Scott had by nature There is, of course, no novel of Sir Walter's which is without his characteristic humor. But Scottish life afforded him the finest field for the display of it, and it is here we shall find all the best specimens. In depicting the humors of mankind where they do not verge on eccentricity, or at all events exhibit very salient peculiarities, Scott has been surpassed by other writers; nor has he as a rule laid out his strength on characters of this description, though the exceptions seem to show that he underrated his own powers in this respect. If he has given us nothing approaching to Mr. Elton or Mrs. Norris, he has at least given us Waverley himself, an admirable study of a character in which there is nothing eccentric to lay hold 294 LIVING AGE. VOL. VI. own to being slightly wearied of the frequency with which Hetty's " poor little soul" is turned inside out for their inspection, as well as of the eternal self-consciousness and self-questionings of her seducer. We do not want these things in a novel; they hinder the progress of events, and serve no purpose in return. Now of this fault, or this habit, Scott is entirely guiltless. George Eliot would probably have spent pages in depicting the struggle in Effie's mind after she resolved not to meet Robertson again. But not the most copious and minute dissertation could have thrown more light upon it than Scott's simple words: as keen a perception of those subtle | Widow Patten, "who'd niver been a distinctions of character which lie be- sinner," cannot be surpassed. But we low the surface, as he had of those faucy, if her warmest worshippers more conspicuous and abnormal traits spoke the truth, many of them would which are visible to the whole world, and constitute what we variously call singularity or eccentricity. But seeing that, for one reader who can understand portraits of the former kind, a hundred can appreciate the latter, it is no wonder that the characters we have named have been overshadowed by the better-known ones whose peculiarities are more strongly marked, - Bradwardine, Oldbuck, Nicol Jarvie, the captain of Knockdunder, and Dugald Dalgetty; to say nothing of James I., who has been thought to beat them all. But, inimitable as is the humor of "The Antiquary" and "Rob Roy," for those who have the palate to taste it, it was not to this quality that Scott owed his popularity in the first instance. It was the heroic and the tragic elements of his prose fiction, his command over the passions, which placed him at one bound on the highest pinnacle of literature. In humor, delicious as his humor is, he has had equals and perhaps more than one superior. In the loftier region of his art he has one only. It is now time that we turned briefly to Scott's methods and plots, which are likewise of a kind to ensure him a more lasting hold on the admiration of the world than is likely to be retained by many of our later writers, whose boast it is to have gone more deeply into the problems of humanity and the mysteries of existence. For the diffuse moral analysis which we find, for instance, in George Eliot, Sir Walter tells us in a few bold strokes all we want to know, and all in fact that can be told without impeding the action of the story. If we compare the treatment of Effie Deans with the treatment of Hetty Sorrel, so much alike in many external particulars, we shall see the difference between the two in a very strong light. We yield to no one in admiration of George Eliot. Her purely humorous characters are merum nectar; her Solomon Macy, her Joshua Raun, her resolved I'll no gang back. Now here the real state of the case and the struggle going on in Effie's mind is conveyed to us with just as much clearness as if a whole chapter had been given to it; while its greater brevity leaves a margin for the imagination, which the analytic method takes away. A still finer example is to be found in "The Bride of Lammermoor," where Caleb Balderston listens all night outside his master's door after his return to Wolf's Crag from the funeral of Lucy Ashton : The old man retired, not to rest, but to prayer, and from time to time crept to the door of the apartment in order to find out whether Ravenswood had gone to repose. His measured, heavy step upon the floor the repeated stamps of the heel of his was only interrupted by deep groans, and heavy boot intimated too clearly that the wretched inmate was abandoning himself at such moments to paroxysms of uncontrolled agony. |