‘THE PIRATE’
| The London Magazine.] | [January, 1822. |
This is not the best, nor is it the worst (the worst is good enough for us) of the Scotch Novels. There is a story in it, an interest excited almost from the first, a clue which you get hold of and wish to follow out; a mystery to be developed, and which does not disappoint you at last. After you once get into the stream, you read on with eagerness, and have only to complain of the number of impediments and diversions thrown in your way. The author is evidently writing to gain time, to make up his complement of volumes, his six thousand guineas worth of matter; and to get to the end of your journey, and satisfy the curiosity he has raised, you must be content to travel with him, stop when he stops, and turn out of the road as often as he pleases. He dallies with your impatience, and smiles in your face, but you cannot, and dare not be angry with him, while with his giant-hand he plays at pushpin with the reader, and sweeps the rich stakes from the table. He has, they say, got a plum by his writings. What have not the public got by reading them? The course of exchange is, and will be, in our favour, as long as he gives us one volume for ourselves, and two for himself. Who is there that has not been the better, the wiser, and happier man for these fine and inexhaustible productions of genius? The more striking characters and situations are not quite so highly wrought up in the present, as in some former instances, nor are they so crowded, so thickly sown. But the genius of the author is not exhausted, nor can it be so till not a Scotch superstition, or popular tradition is left, or till the pen drops lifeless and regretted from its master’s hand. Ah! who will then call the mist from its hill? Who will make the circling eddies roar? Who, with his ‘so potent art,’ will dim the sun, or stop the winds, that wave the forest-heads, in their course? Who will summon the spirits of the northern air from their chill abodes, or make gleaming lake or hidden cavern teem with wizard, or with elfin forms? There is no one but the Scottish Prospero, but old Sir Walter, can do the trick aright. He is the very genius of the clime—mounts in her old grey clouds, dips in her usquebaugh and whiskey!—startles you with her antique Druid spells in the person of Elshie, or stirs up the fierce heat of her theological fires with Macbriar and Kettle-drumle: sweeps the country with a far war-cry to Lochiel, or sighs out the soul of love in the perfumed breath of the Lily of St. Leonard’s. Stand thou, then, Meg Merrilies, on the point of thy fated rock, with wild locks and words streaming to the wind; and sit thou there in thy narrow recess, Balfour of Burley, betwixt thy Bible and thy sword, thy arm of flesh and arm of the Spirit:—when the last words have passed the lips of the author of Waverley, there will be none to re-kindle your fires, or recall your spirit! Let him write on then to the last drop of ink in his ink-stand, even though it should not be made according to the model of that described by Mr. Coleridge, and we will not be afraid to read whatever he is not ashamed to publish. We are the true and liege subjects of his pen, and profess our ultra-fealty in this respect, like the old French leaguers, with a Quand même.
The Pirate is not what we expected, nor is it new. We had looked for a prodigious row—landing and boarding, cut and thrust, blowing up of ships, and sacking of sea-ports, with the very devil to pay, and a noise to deafen clamour,
‘Guns, drums, trumpets,
Blunderbusses and thunder.’
We supposed that for the time ‘Hell itself would be empty, and all the devils be here.’ There be land pirates and water pirates; and we thought Sir Walter would be for kicking up just such a dust by sea, in the Buccaneers, (as it was to be called) as he has done by land in Old Mortality. Multum abludit imago. There is nothing or little of the sort. There is here (bating a sprinkling of twenty pages of roaring lads, who come on shore for no use but to get themselves hanged in the Orkneys,) only a single Pirate, a peaking sort of gentleman, spiteful, but not enterprising; in love, and inclined to take up and reform, but very equivocal in the sentiments he professes, and in those he inspires in others. Cleveland is the Pirate, who is wrecked off the coast of Zetland, is saved from destruction by young Mordaunt Mertoun, who had been so far the hero of the piece, and jilts him with his mistress, Minna, a grave sentimentalist, and the elder of two sisters, to whom Mordaunt had felt a secret and undeclared passion. The interest of the novel hinges on this bizarre situation of the different parties. Sir Walter (for he has in the present work leisure on his hands to philosophize) here introduces a dissertation of some length, but not much depth, to show that the jilting of favoured, or half-favoured lovers, comes by the dispensation of Providence, and that the breed of honest men and bonny lasses would be spoiled if the fairest of the fair, the sentimental Miss, and the prude (contrary to all previous and common-place calculation), did not prefer the blackguard and the bravo, to the tender, meek, puny, unpretending, heartbroken lover. We do not think our novelist manages his argument well, or shines in his new Professor’s chair of morality. Miss Polly Peachum, we do indeed remember, the artless, soft, innocent Polly, fell in love with the bold Captain Macheath; but so did Miss Lucy Lockitt too, who was no chicken, and who, according to this new balance of power in the empire of love, ought to have tempered her fires with the phlegm of some young chaplain to the prison, or the soft insinuations of some dreaming poet. But as our author himself is not in a hurry to get on with his story, we will imitate him, and let him speak here in his superfluous character of a casuist, or commentator on his own narrative.
[A long passage from Chap, XIII., beginning ‘Captain Cleveland sate betwixt the sisters,’ follows.]
Suffice it to say, that we differ from this solution of the difficulty, ingenious and old as it is; and to justify that opinion, ask only whether such a man as Cleveland would not be a general favourite with women, instead of being so merely with those of a particularly retired and fantastic character, which destroys the author’s balance of qualities in love? Indeed, his own story is a very bad illustration of his doctrine; for this romantic and imprudent attachment of the gentle and sensitive Minna to the bold and profligate Captain Cleveland leads to nothing but the most disastrous consequences; and the opposition between their sentiments and characters, which was to make them fit partners for life, only prevents the possibility of their union, and renders both parties permanently miserable. Besides, the whole perplexity is, after all, gratuitous. The enmity between Cleveland and young Mertoun (the chief subject of the plot) is founded on their jealousy of each other in regard to Minna, and yet there had been no positive engagement between her and Mertoun, who, like Edmund in Lear, is equally betrothed to both sisters—in the end marrying the one that he as well as the reader likes least. Afterwards, when the real character of this gay rover of the seas is more fully developed, and he gets into scrapes with the police of Orkney, the grave, romantic Minna, like a true northern lass, deserts him, and plays off a little old-fashioned, unavailing, but discreet morality upon him. When the reader begins to sympathise with ‘a brave man in distress,’ then is the time for his mistress with ‘the pale face and raven locks’ to look to her own character. We like the theory of the Beggar’s Opera better than this: the ladies there followed their supposed hero, their beau ideal of a lover, to prison, instead of leaving him to his untoward fate. Minna is no NUT-BROWN MAID, though she has a passion for outlaws, between whose minds and those of the graver and more reflecting of the fair sex there is, according to the opinion of our GREAT UNKNOWN, a secret and pre-established harmony. What is still more extraordinary and unsatisfactory in the progress of the story is this—all the pretended preternatural influence of Norna of the Fitful-Head, the most potent and impressive personage in the drama, is exerted to defeat Cleveland’s views, and to give Minna to Mordaunt Mertoun, for whom she conceives an instinctive and anxious attachment as her long-lost son; and yet in the end the whole force of this delusion, and the reader’s sympathies, are destroyed by the discovery that Cleveland, not Mertoun, is her real offspring, and that she has been equally led astray by her maternal affection and preternatural pretensions. Does this great writer of romances, this profound historiographer of the land of visions and of second sight, thus mean to qualify his thrilling mysteries—to back out of his thrice-hallowed prejudices, and to turn the tables upon us with modern cant and philosophic scepticism? That is the last thing we could forgive him!
We have said that the characters of the Pirate are not altogether new. Norna, the enchantress, whom he is ‘so fond’ at last to depose from her ideal cloudy throne of spells and mystic power, is the Meg Merrilies of the scene. She passes over it with vast strides, is at hand whenever she is wanted, sits hatching fate on the topmost tower that overlooks the wilderness of waves, or glides suddenly from a subterraneous passage, and in either case moulds the elements of nature, and the unruly passions of men, to her purposes. She has ‘strange power of speech,’ weaves events with words, is present wherever she pleases, and performs what she wills, and yet she doubts her own power, and criticises her own pretensions. Meg Merrilies was an honester witch. She at least stuck true to herself. We hate anything by halves; and most of all, imagination and superstition piece-meal. Cleveland, again, is a sort of inferior Gentle Geordie, and Minna lags after Effie Deans, the victim of misplaced affection, but far, far behind. Wert thou to live a thousand years, and write a thousand romances, thou wouldst never, old True-penny, beat thy own Heart of Mid Lothian! It is for that we can forgive thee all that thou didst mean to write in the Beacon, or hast written elsewhere, beneath the dignity of thy genius and knowledge of man’s weaknesses, as well as better nature! Magnus Troil is a great name, a striking name; but we ken his person before; he is of the same genealogy as the Bailie Braidwardine, and other representatives of old Scottish hospitality; the dwarf Nick Strumpfer is of a like familiar breed, only uglier and more useless than any former one: we have even traces, previous to the Pirate, of the extraordinary agriculturist and projector, Mr. Timothy Yellowley, and his sister, Miss Barbara Yellowley, with pinched nose and grey eyes; but we confess we have one individual who was before a stranger to us, at least in these parts, namely, Claud Halcro, the poet, and friend of ‘Glorious John.’ We do not think him in his place amidst dwarfs, witches, pirates, and Udallers; and his stories of the Wits’ Coffee-house and Dryden’s poetry are as tedious to the critical reader as they are to his Zetland patron and hearers. We might confirm this opinion by a quotation, but we should be thought too tedious. He fills up, we will venture to say, a hundred pages of the work with sheer impertinence, with pribble prabble. Whenever any serious matter is to be attended to, Claud Halcro pulls out his fiddle and draws the long bow, and repeats some verses of ‘Glorious John.’ Bunce, the friend of Cleveland, is much better; for we can conceive how a strolling-player should turn gentleman-rover in a time of need, and the foppery and finery of the itinerant stage-hero become the quarter-deck exceedingly well. In general, however, our author’s humour requires the aid of costume and dialect to set it off to advantage: his wit is Scotch, not English wit. It must have the twang of the uncouth pronunciation and peculiar manners of the country in it. The elder Mertoun is a striking misanthropic sketch; but it is not very well made out in what his misanthropy originates, nor to what it tends. He is merely a part of the machinery: neither is he the first gentleman in these Novels who lands without an introduction on the remote shores of Scotland, and shuts himself up (for reasons best known to himself) in inaccessible and solitary confinement. We had meant to give the outline of the story of the Pirate, but we are ill at a plot, and do not care to blunt the edge of the reader’s curiosity by anticipating each particular. As far, however, as relates to the historical foundation of the narrative, the author has done it to our hands, and we give his words as they stand in the Advertisement.
[Nearly the whole of the Advertisement is quoted.]
Of the execution of these volumes we need hardly speak. It is inferior, but it is only inferior to some of his former works. Whatever he touches, we see the hand of a master. He has only to describe action, thoughts, scenes, and they everywhere speak, breathe, and live. It matters not whether it be a calm sea-shore, a mountain tempest, a drunken brawl, the ‘Cathedral’s choir and gloom,’ the Sybil’s watch-tower, or the smuggler’s cave; the things are immediately there that we should see, hear, and feel. He is Nature’s Secretary. He neither adds to, nor takes away from her book; and that makes him what he is, the most popular writer living. We might give various instances of his unrivalled undecaying power, but shall select only one or two with which we were most struck and delighted in the perusal. The characters of the two sisters, daughters of Magnus Troil, and the heroines of the tale, are thus beautifully drawn.
[Here follows the description of Minna and Brenda, from Chap. III.]
So much for elegant Vandyke portrait-painting. Now for something of the Salvator style. Norna, the terrific and unhappy Norna, is thus finely introduced.
[The first introduction of Norna is quoted from Chap. V.]
We give one more extract in a different style; and we think the comic painting in it is little inferior to Hogarth’s.
[A passage, beginning ‘Now the fortunate arrival of Mordaunt,’ &c. is quoted from Chap. XI.]
Shall we go on? No, but will leave the reader to revel at ease in the luxuries of feeling and description scattered through the rest of the work.
We have only time to add two remarks more, which we do not remember to have seen made. One relates to the exquisitely good-natured and liberal tone displayed in the author’s quotations from living writers. He takes them every one by turns, and of all factions in poetry and politics, under his wing, and sticks a stanza from Coleridge, from Wordsworth, from Byron, from Crabbe, from Rogers, as a motto to his chapters, not jealous of their popularity, nor disdaining their obscurity. The author can hardly guess how much we like him for this. The second thing we would advert to is a fault, and a remarkable one. It is the slovenliness of the style and badness of the grammar throughout these admirable productions. Badness of the grammar! Slovenly style! What do you mean by that? Take a few instances, and we have done with the subject for ever. We give them seriatim, as we marked them in the margin.
‘Here Magnus proceeded with great animation, sipping from time to time the half diluted spirit, which at the same time animated his resentment against the intruders,’ etc. P. 16.
‘In those days (for the present times are greatly altered for the better) the presence of a superior in such a situation,’ etc. P. 21.
‘The information, which she acquired by habits of patient attention, were indelibly rivetted in a naturally powerful memory.’ P. 48.
‘And I know not whom else are expected.’ P. 56.
‘Or perhaps he preferred the situation, of the house and farm which he himself was to occupy (which indeed was a tolerable one) as preferable to that, etc.’ P. 89.
‘The strength of the retiring wave proved even stronger than he had expected,’ etc. P. 169.
But let us have done with this, and leave it to the Editor of the Quarterly Review to take up the subject as a mighty important little discovery of his own!