Scott’s “architectonic,” his principles in the composition of historical novels, are well known, and the method was all his own. Others before him had attempted the historical novel, but wholly without his knowledge of history, and of the actual way of living and thinking in various periods of the past. He first made the dry bones of history live, and Macaulay and Froude follow his method, perhaps rather too closely. Several of Mr. Froude’s most dramatic scenes never, as a matter of fact, occurred. It is probable that a too hasty glance at notes from original documents misled him, and his dramatic instinct did the rest, without a backward look at the original papers, a look which would have made re-writing necessary—and caused the dramatic situation to disappear! Scott, of course, wrote novels under no historical trammels of accuracy. He deliberately committed the most glaring anachronisms, bringing the dead Amy Robsart to life long after her mysterious death, introducing Shakespeare as a successful dramatist at an age when he was creeping unwillingly to school—and then Scott would confess his anachronisms in a note. Modern historical novelists, though they write from the results of “cram,” and not from a mind already charged with history, try at least to subject themselves to the actual circumstances of the past, and not to subject historical circumstances to themselves. They dare not bring Charles II to Woodstock, in his flight after Worcester, because it is too well known that the King did not make by way of Woodstock for the south coast. On such points of composition, Scott was as reckless as Turner was in landscape; both were satisfied, as the reader usually is, if they got their effects. Mr. Swinburne, in his drama of Mary Stuart, is not more nice. Lady Boyne (Mary Beaton) was never near Mary Stuart in England, though a play turns on her presence there.
THE NOVELS
Scott’s plan was never to make a famous character of history the central personage of his tale. Thus he never could have written a novel of which the fortunes of Mary Stuart were the central interest. He deemed that the facts were too well known to be trifled with, and that, in such matters, romance could not cope with actuality. Thus the unhappy Queen appears as a subordinate character—not as heroine, that is to say—while, in the scene in which the night of Darnley’s murder is recalled to her memory, she reaches the height of tragedy. These two principles, not to make the protagonists of history his central characters; not to cope with the records of actual events, are the guiding, if negative principles of Scott. He invents heroes and heroines who never existed, nor could have existed. There could be no Henry Morton in 1679! He uses them mainly as pivots round which the characters revolve. The heroes and heroines themselves, as a rule, interest their creator, and his readers, but little. What can you make of a jeune premier? He must be brave, modest, handsome, good, and not too clever—an ideal son-in-law, and he must be a true lover. Scott pronounced his earliest hero, Edward Waverley, “a sneaking piece of imbecility.... I am a bad hand at depicting a hero properly so-called.” True, but what kind of hero is Martin Chuzzlewit, or Clive Newcome, and is there any hero at all in Vanity Fair? Tom Jones and Captain Booth take leading parts, but are nothing less than heroic. They are characters, however, and Scott’s heroes, except Quentin Durward, Roland Graeme, Harry Gow, and the Master of Ravenswood (un beau ténébreux), are not of much account as characters.
Unlike Thackeray, Dickens, and possibly Fielding, Scott never drew his hero from himself. In politics they are usually what he was—when he wrote history—they take the middle path, they are in the sober juste milieu. Waverley is only a Jacobite to please his lady; Henry Morton is an extremely moderate constitutional Whig. Nobody can take much interest in Vanbeest Brown, the wandering heir of Guy Mannering, despite his proficiency on the flageolet. When we have a true hero like Montrose, we are scarcely allowed to look on his face and hear his voice. Ivanhoe, like an honourable gentleman, curbs his passion for Rebecca, and is true to Rowena, though we see that the memory of Rebecca never leaves his heart. Ivanhoe behaves as, in his circumstances, Scott would have behaved, in place of giving way to passion. Novels of the most poignant interest are constantly beginning, in private life, and then break off, because the living characters are persons of honour and self-control. Ivanhoe would have been more to the taste of to-day, if the hero had eloped with the fair Hebrew—but then, Ivanhoe and Rowena are persons of honour and self-control. I found, in Scott’s papers, a letter from an enthusiastic schoolboy, a stranger—“Oh, Sir Walter, how could you kill the gallant cavalier, and give the lady to the crop-eared Whig?” This was the remark of the natural man. Scott kept the natural man in subjection. The heroes, except when they are “bonny fechters” like Harry Gow, Roland Graeme, and Quentin Durward—that canny soldier of fortune—are little more than parts of the machinery, and modes of introducing the pell-mell of nominally subordinate, but really essential characters of all ranks and degrees—the undying friends with whom Scott brings us acquainted.
THE NOVELS
The heroines, though it seems a paradox to say so, are really more successful than the heroes. In The Heart of Midlothian there is no hero except the heroine, Jeanie Deans, certainly one of the great creations of literature. Scott has made goodness without beauty, without overmastering tragedy, without “wallowing naked in the pathetic,” and without passion, as interesting as Becky Sharp. Who has rivalled this feat? Rose Bradwardine, with her innocent self-betrayed affection, is an elder sister of Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey. Though rather stilted, in the manner of the period, Rebecca is a noble creature. Catherine Seyton, of The Abbot, is a delightfully spirited girl, and Diana Vernon is peerless. Our hearts warm even to the prematurely puritan Fair Maid of Perth, when she runs, with loose hair, like a wild creature, to her lover’s door, on the false news of his death. Fair eyes were wont to weep over Lucy Ashton, the Ophelia of Scott; but now Lucy is out of fashion though her end, surely, is poignant enough, when the weak mind is broken, and the animal stands at bay, like a wild cat, and breaks the hunter’s toils, and dies a maiden in the bridal chamber.
As Molière never had the heart to draw a jealous woman, among all his pictures of men who knew, like himself, the torments of jealousy, so Scott never had the heart to draw a young and beautiful woman who is wicked. This ancient familiar source of poignant interest he passes by, out of his great chivalry. There was nothing to prevent him from writing a romance on the passionate, wretched tale of the once beautiful Ulrica, in Ivanhoe, a fair traitress driven on the winds of revenge, treachery, parricide, and incest. Here was a theme for a “realistic” novel of England after the Conquest, but Scott sketches it lightly, as a Thyestean horror in the background. In his work such a piece of “realism” stands alone, like the story of Phoenix in Homer’s work (in the Ninth Book of the Iliad). Both artists, Scott and Homer, had a sense of reverence of human things: they did not lack the imagination necessary for the portrayal of the evil and terrible, but they did not seek success in that popular region. Scott was no prude, but he held the young in reverence, knowing that among them he must have many readers.
THE NOVELS
I am unable to think the worse of him because he imposed on himself limitations which Byron triumphantly broke through, though Scott’s limits now militate against a high appreciation of his work by the admirers of M. Guy de Maupassant and M. Catulle Mendès. “A man canna do what he canna do,” and Scott could not have treated the favourite themes of these masters, if he would. He had funds enough to draw upon in human life and character, without hunting for personages and situations in dark malodorous corners. The glory of his work is, of course, not merely his wealth of incident, and his natural gift of story telling, but his crowd of characters, from his princes, such as James VI, an immortal picture, Louis XI, Elizabeth, Mary, Charles II in flight or in such prosperity as he loved, to his Highland chiefs, his ploughmen, his lairds, Bucklaw and old Redgauntlet, the persecutor; his copper captains in Alsatia, his baillies, his Covenanting preachers, his Claverhouse, his serving men, his Andrew Fairservice, his yeomen, his Dandie Dinmont, with the Dinmont family and terriers, his wild women, Meg Merrilees, and Madge Wildfire; his smugglers, his lawyers, from Pleydell to the elder Fairford, and even his bores, who, like Miss Austen’s bores, are certainly too much with us, who can number the throng of such characters, all living and delightful? The novels are vécus: the author has, in imagination, lived closely and long with his people, whether of his own day, or of the past, before he laid brush to canvas to execute their portraits. It is in this capacity, as a creator of a vast throng of living people of every grade, and every variety of nature, humour, and temperament, that Scott, among British writers, is least remote from Shakespeare. No changes in taste and fashion as regards matters unessential, no laxities and indolence of his own, no feather-headed folly, or leaden stupidity of new generations can deprive Scott of these unfading laurels. The novels that charmed Europe and America, that were the inspiration of Dumas, that have been affectionately discussed by the greatest of modern British statesmen, were as conspicuously open to criticism, and were as severely handled by reviewers, in Scott’s own day as in our own. But, if we may judge by endless new editions of all sorts, and at various prices, the Waverley novels are not less popular now, than are, for their little span, the most successful flights of all-daring ignorance and bombastic presumption. It was on his characters, especially on his characters sketched among his own people, that Scott believed the interest of his romances to depend. He generously recognized Miss Edgeworth as his teacher: “If I could but hit Miss Edgeworth’s wonderful power of vivifying all her persons, and making them live as beings in your mind, I should not despair,” he said.
Meanwhile, outside of “the big bow wow” line, he regarded Miss Austen as his superior, nor was he wrong; that queen of fiction has come to her own again. In his brief, and on the whole admirable, Scott, the late Mr. Hutton defended Scott’s power of character-drawing better than I can hope to do, if it needs defence, against Mr. Carlyle, who had some slight private bitterness against Sir Walter, on a matter of an unanswered letter. He calls Scott’s men and women “little more than mechanical cases, deceptively painted automatons.” This is the Carlyle who conceded to Cardinal Newman the possession of intellectual powers equivalent to those of a rabbit; un vrai lapin! Scott “fashions his characters from the skin inwards, never getting near the heart of them.” Never near the broken