It was vain to say that only Scott knew so much of Highlands and Lowlands as the author knew: that no other man had his acquaintance with the personal side of old history, that no other could have written the snatches of verse in the romances. People enjoy a mystery, and Scott enjoyed mystifying them, while his conscience permitted him a latitude in denial warranted by the maxims of Father Holt, S.J., in Esmond. As a loyal citizen might blamelessly say that King Charles was not in the oak tree—His Majesty being private there, and invisible to loyal eyes—so Scott, if pressed, averred that he had no hand in the novels, often adding that, even if he had, he would still deny his authorship.
Casuists may blame or exonerate him (Cardinal Newman discussed the situation): it is certain that no man is bound to incriminate himself.
Jeffrey detected Scott, of course, and reviewed him with the usual grotesque assumption of superiority. O le grand homme, rien ne lui peut plaire! The Quarterly dullard probably did not recognize Scott’s hand, and spoke of the Scots tongue as “a dark dialogue” (so in Lockhart!) “of Anglified Erse,” a deathless exhibition of stupid ignorance.
THE NOVELS
The general characteristics, the merits and defects of the Waverley novels may be reviewed, before we approach the history of each example in its turn. In an age when an acquaintance with FitzGerald’s Rubáiyàt of Omar Kháyyám, an exhaustive ignorance of all literature of the past, and an especial contempt for Scott, whom FitzGerald so intensely admired, are the equipment of many critics, we must be very cautious in praising the Waverley novels. They are not the work of a passionate, a squalid, or a totally uneducated genius. They are not the work of any Peeping Tom who studies woman in her dressing-room, and tries to spy or smell out the secrets of the eternally feminine. We have novels to-day—novels by males—full of clever spyings and dissections of womankind, which Scott would have thrown into the fire. “I think,” writes Mr. Hutton, “that the deficiency of his pictures of women ... should be greatly attributed to his natural chivalry.... He hardly ventured, as it were, in his tenderness for them, to look deeply into their little weaknesses and intricacies of character.”
Scott’s novels, again, are not the work of a man who desires to enforce his social, or religious, or political ideals and ideas in his romances. Like almost all great novels, except Tom Jones, they do not possess carefully elaborated plots, any more than do most of the dramas of Shakespeare. They are far from being the work of a conscientious stylist, beating his brains for hours to find le mot propre, usually the least natural word for any mortal to use in the circumstances. But once Scott did hunt for le mot propre, in Scots. He could not find it, and came out to the lawn at Abbotsford where some workmen were engaged. He turned a bucket upside down, and asked the men, “What did I do just now?” “Ye whummled the bowie,” said the men, and Scott had found the word he wanted—to “whummle.” Mr. Saintsbury has a little excursus on this word, “whummle,” or “whammle,” which Scott, he has heard, picked up from a woman in the street. But every Scot knows it, for to “whummle the bannock,” in the presence of a Menteith, was a proverbial insult, as Menteith, or one of his men, is said, by whummling the loaf, to have given the signal of betrayal, when English soldiers lay in wait before seizing Sir William Wallace.
THE NOVELS
Far from being a conscientious stylist, Scott not infrequently proves the truth of his own remark to Lockhart, that he never learned grammar. I have found five “whiches” in a sentence of his, and five “ques” in a sentence by Alexandre Dumas, his pupil and rival. Dumas had more of the humour of Scott than Scott had of the wit of Dumas. Many parts of his tales are prolix: his openings, as a rule, are dull. His heroes and heroines often speak in the stilted manner of Miss Burney’s Lord Orville, a manner (if we may trust memoirs and books like Boswell’s Johnson, and Walpole’s Letters), in which no men and women of mould ever did talk, even in the eighteenth century. But Catherine Glover, in The Fair Maid of Perth, usually speaks from stilts. These pompous discourses in which the speaker often talks of himself in the third person, were in vogue, in novel writing, we do not know why, and they are a stone of stumbling to readers who do not blench when a modern hero mouths fustian in the tone of a demoniac at large. All these unfashionable traits are to be found up and down the Waverley novels, combined with descriptive passages that, to some, are a weariness. These are frank confessions from a zealot who has read most of the Waverley novels many times, from childhood up to age, and finds them better, finds fresh beauties in them, every time that he reads them. But there are more serious defects than old-fashionedness, and prolixities (which may be skipped), and laxity of style, and errors in grammar. There are faults in “artistry,” and nobody knew them better, or put his finger on them more ruthlessly, or apologized for them more ingenuously than Scott himself.
THE NOVELS
The Introductions to the Novels have frightened away many a painful would-be student who has been told that, if you read a book, you must read every line of it—from cover to cover. This is an old moral maxim invented and handed on by the class of mortals who are not born readers, and regard literature with moral earnestness as a duty, though a painful duty. There must be no flinching! Scott, like Dr. Johnson, “tore the heart out of a book,” rapidly assimilating what he needed, and “skipping” what he did not need. He wrote his Introductions for the curious literary student, not for the novel reader and the general public. Doubtless he expected the general public to skip the Introductions, and did not reflect that they would trouble persons who adhere to the puritanic rule against what they call “desultory reading.” But whosoever has any interest in Scott’s own theory of the conduct of the historical novel, and in his confession of his own faults, cannot afford to overlook the original Introduction of 1822 to The Fortunes of Nigel. In these pages Captain Clutterbuck describes an interview with “The Eidolon, or representative vision of The Author of Waverley.” Scott, in fact, anticipates the modern “interview,” but he interviews himself, and does the business better than the suave modern reporter. After confessing that The Monastery, especially the White Lady of Avenel, is rather a failure, Scott is asked by Captain Clutterbuck whether his new book meets every single demand of the critics, whether it opens strikingly, proceeds naturally, and ends happily, for critics then applauded what they now denounce—“a happy ending.” Scott replies that Hercules might produce a romance “which should glide, and gush, and never pause, and widen, and deepen, and all the rest on’t,” but that he cannot. “There never was a novel written on this plan while the world stood.” “Pardon me—Tom Jones,” says the Captain. There was also the Odyssey, on which Wolf, the great sceptic as to the unity of the Iliad, bestowed the praise of masterly composition which the Captain gives to Tom Jones. But several modern German critics and Father Browne of the Society of Jesus, assure us that the plot of the Odyssey is a very bad piece of composition, a dawdling bit of patchwork by many hands, in many ages, strung together by a relatively late Greek “botcher,” though why he took the trouble nobody can imagine. Thus do critical opinions differ, and a fair critic informs me that “Tom Jones is the stupidest book in the English language.” Yet, if the Odyssey triumphed over the Zoili of three thousand years, while Tom Jones was an undisputed masterpiece for a century and a half, we may doubt whether the verdict of time and of the world is to be upset for ever by the censures of a few moderns. To them, and to the contemners of Scott, we may say, as Cromwell said to the Commissioners of the General Assembly, “Brethren, in the bowels of Christ, believe that it is possible you may be mistaken.” Scott remarks that, in Fielding’s masterpiece, the Novel, for excellence of composition, “challenged a comparison with the Epic.” Other “great masters,” like Smollett and Le Sage, “have been satisfied if they amuse the reader on the road.” It is enough for himself if his “scenes, unlaboured and loosely put together, have sufficient interest in them to amuse in one corner the pain of the body; in another to relieve anxiety of mind; in a third place to unwrinkle a brow bent with the furrows of daily toil; in another to fill the place of bad thoughts, or to suggest better; in yet another to induce an idler to study the history of his country; in all ... to furnish harmless amusement.”