“Captain.—Resolution and determined forbearance might remedy that evil.
“Author.—Alas! my dear sir, you do not know the force of paternal affection. When I light on such a character as Bailie Jarvie, or Dalgetty, my imagination brightens, and my conception becomes clearer at every step which I take in his company, although it leads me many a weary mile away from the regular road, and forces me to leap hedge and ditch to get back into the route again. If I resist the temptation, as you advise me, my thoughts become prosy, flat, and dull; I write painfully to myself, and under a consciousness of flagging which makes me flag still more; the sunshine with which fancy had invested the incidents, departs from them, and leaves every thing dull and gloomy. I am no more the same author I was in my better mood, than the dog in a wheel, condemned to go round and round for hours, is like the same dog merrily chasing his own tail, and gambolling in all the frolic of unrestrained freedom. In short, sir, on such occasions, I think I am bewitched.”
Scott next professes that he cannot write plays, as the Captain urges him to do, if he would. The applauded scraps of “Old Play” which head many of his chapters, are borrowed from manuscript dramas about which he tells a fable. As to the charge of making money—
O, if it were a mean thing,
The Gentles would not use it;
And if it were ungodly,
The clergy would refuse it.
Moreover, “No man of honour, genius, or spirit, would make the mere love of gain, the chief, far less the only, purpose of his labours. For myself, I am not displeased to find the game a winning one; yet while I pleased the public, I should probably continue it merely for the pleasure of playing; for I have felt as strongly as most folks that love of composition, which is perhaps the strongest of all instincts, driving the author to the pen, the painter to the palette, often without either the chance of fame or the prospect of reward. Perhaps I have said too much of this.”
THE NOVELS
Such is Scott’s confession and apology. To plan a work to scale, to pursue a predetermined course, does not “set his genius,” as Alan Breck says. Nor did it set the genius of an artist so conscientious as Alan’s creator, Mr. Stevenson. The pre-arranged programme or scenario of his Kidnapped, was very unlike the actual romance as it stands. The preeminent merit of Scott was that of a creator of characters. These personages became living, and, because they were living, spontaneous and uncontrollable. What began as a “Legend of Montrose,” left the great Marquis in the background, and became the Odyssey of Thackeray’s favourite, Dugald Dalgetty, “of Drumthwacket that should be,” that inimitable and immortal man of the sword. So it is throughout the Waverley novels. The characters will “gang their ain gait.” They come across the author’s fancy, as Mrs. Gamp, who had no part in the original plan of Martin Chuzzlewit, came across the fancy of Dickens, and they work their will on plot and author. In fact, the almost mechanical merit of construction or charpentage is rarely found in the great novels of the great masters. Vanity Fair “has no outline,” as Mr. Mantalini says of the lady of rank, and, if Pendennis “has an outline, it is a demned outline.” Of Esmond the motto may hold good—
Servetur ad imum
Qualis ab incepto processerit, et sibi constet.
But this merit, from the days of Cervantes downwards, has been the least sought after by the greatest novelists. Scott tells us that at night he would leave off writing without an idea as to how he was to get his characters out of a quandary, and that, in the half-hour after waking, all would become clear to him. Charlotte Brontë makes a similar confession. In his manuscript, Scott never goes back to delete and alter—better would it have been had he taken the trouble. But his proof-sheets show that he took a good deal of pains in adding and improving, especially in that impeccable little chef d’oeuvre, “Wandering Willie’s Tale” in Redgauntlet. We are thus obliged to confess that he was on occasion culpably indolent. Mr. Stevenson cites a romantic passage of Guy Mannering in which Scott, rather than go back and indicate, in an earlier passage, the presence of a fountain which he suddenly finds that he needs, hurries forward and drags the fountain into a long, trailing, shapeless sentence. Guy Mannering, we know, was “written in six weeks at Christmas,” for the purpose of “refreshing the machine.” Undeniably it would be better, good as it is, had a fortnight been given to revision.
THE NOVELS