THE NOVELS
The Chantrey Bust of Sir Walter Scott, 1820.
stoical heart of Saunders Mucklebackit; of the fallen Bradwardine, happy in unsullied honour; never near the heart of the maddened Peter Peebles; never near the flawless Christian heart of Bessie M’Clure; or the heart of dauntless remorse of Nancy Ewart; or the heart of sacrificed love in Diana Vernon; or the stout heart of Dalgetty in the dungeon of Inveraray; or the secret soul of Mary Stuart, revealed when she is reminded of Bastian’s bridal mask, and the deed of Kirk o’ Field? Quid plura, Thomas Carlyle wrote splenetic nonsense: “he was very capable of having it happen to him.”
CHAPTER V
GUY MANNERING TO KENILWORTH
“WAVERLEY”
“Waverley” is not, perhaps, the novel with which one would recommend a person anxious to find out whether or not Sir Walter can still be read, to begin his studies. The six chapters written in 1805 are prolix and unnecessary. A modern narrator would commence with Chapter VIII. “It was about noon when Captain Waverley entered the straggling village or rather hamlet of Tully-Veolan,” and would find easy means of enlightening us as to who Captain Waverley was. One sentence in the long preliminary account of the hero refers to Scott himself. “He would exercise for hours that internal sorcery, by which past or imaginary scenes are presented, in action as it were, to the eyes of the muser.” Like Dickens and Thackeray, Scott was a natural “visualizer,” seeing in his mind’s eye the aspects of his characters, and hearing their voices. Perhaps there is no poetic genius without this gift, which Mr. Galton has found almost absent among, and unknown to men of science, though the presence of the power of visualization by no means implies that it is accompanied by genius. Scott’s friends did not conceal from him that they were little interested in his tale, before they entered the village and château of Tully-Veolan. From that point all was new to most of them, while no romance of the Forty-Five, a theme now so hackneyed, or of Highland life and manners at the date of Sixty Years Since had ever been offered to the world. Indeed the death of the last of the male line of Stuart was almost contemporary with the year in which Scott began his romance, and while there remained a shadowy King over the water, a Jacobite romance might seem a thing in doubtful taste. We cannot, after a century, feel the absolute freshness of impression which the novel made on contemporary readers.
“GUY MANNERING”