SCOTT AND ROMANTICISM
SCOTT AND ROMANTICISM
Scott's place in the romantic movement.
The genius of a man like Scott does not leap into the world a complete and novel creation, like Minerva from the skull of Jupiter, ready for battle, and accoutred in the armour that it never afterwards forsakes. Nor does it with the strength of its own hand turn one world into another, or the audience of Fielding and Smollett into that of the Waverley Novels. The world is prepared for it; it finds its weapons lying round its cradle, and works its miracle with the world's co-operation.
Romanticism, although, in our indolence, we like to think of it as the work of a single man, as a stream gushing from the hard rock at the stroke of a Moses, was no conjuring trick, nor sudden invention, but a force as old as story-telling. The rock had been built gradually over it, and was as gradually taken away. It suits our convenience and the pictorial inclination of our minds to imagine it as the work of one man or two; but there is hardly need to remind ourselves of facts we have so wilfully forgotten, and that, if we choose, we can trace without difficulty a more diffuse as well as a more ancient origin of the spring.
Romanticism was a movement too large and too various to be defined in a paragraph, or to allow an essay on any single man to describe, even in the art of story-telling, its several sources, and the innumerable streams that flowed from them to fertilise the nineteenth century. It carried with it liberty and toleration, liberty of expression and toleration of all kinds of spiritual and physical vitality. It was comparable with and related to the French Revolution. It allowed men to see each other in their relations with the universe as well as with each other, and made existence a thing about which it was possible to be infinitely curious. Old desires for terror and fantasy and magnificence arose in the most civilised of minds. Glamour was thrown over the forest and the palace, and the modern and ancient worlds came suddenly together, so that all the ages seemed to be contemporary and all conditions of human life simultaneous and full of promise.
Scott was a part of this revivified world, and his importance in it is not that of its inventor, but of the man who brought so many of its qualities into the art of story-telling that his novels became a secondary inspiration, and moved men as different as Hugo, Balzac, and Dumas, to express themselves in narrative.