SIR WALTER SCOTT
Romanticism before the Waverley Novels.
Before the writing of the Waverley Novels, Romanticism in English narrative had shown itself but a stuttering and one-legged abortion, remarkable only for its extravagances. It had not, except in poetry, been humane enough to be literature. It had made only violent gesticulations like a man shut up in a sack.
Horace Walpole, protesting, I suppose, against Fielding and Smollett, had said that the 'great resources of fancy had been dammed up by a strict adherence to common life,' while the older romances were 'all imagination and improbability.' He had tried to combine the two in The Castle of Otranto, a book in which portraits sigh and step down from their canvases, dead hermits reappear as skeletons in sackcloth, and gigantic ghosts in armour rise to heaven in a clap of thunder. These eccentricities were efforts after the strangeness of all true romance, and their instant popularity showed how ready people were for mystery and ancient tale. Before Scott succeeded in doing what Walpole had attempted, in writing a tale that should be strange but sane, ancient but real, a crowd of novels, whose most attractive quality was their 'horridness,' had turned the heads of the young women who read them. Miss Thorpe, in Northanger Abbey, says:
'My dearest Catherine, what have you been doing with yourself all this morning? Have you gone on with Udolpho?'
'Yes, I have been reading it ever since I woke; and I am got to the black veil.'
'Are you indeed? How delightful! Oh! I would not tell you what is behind the black veil for the world! Are not you wild to know?'
'Oh! yes, quite; what can it be? But do not tell me: I would not be told upon any account. I know it must be a skeleton; I am sure it is Laurentina's skeleton. Oh! I am delighted with the book! I should like to spend my whole life in reading it, I assure you; if it had not been to meet you, I would not have come away from it for all the world.'
'Dear creature, how much I am obliged to you; and when you have finished Udolpho, we will read the Italian together; and I have made out a list of ten or twelve more of the same kind for you.'
'Have you indeed! How glad I am! What are they all?'
'I will read you their names directly; here they are in my pocket-book. Castle of Wolfenbach, Clermont, Mysterious Warnings, Necromancer of the Black Forest, Midnight Bell, Orphan of the Rhine, and Horrid Mysteries. These will last us some time.'
'Yes; pretty well; but are they all horrid? Are you sure they are all horrid?'
'Yes, quite sure, for a particular friend of mine, a Miss Andrews, a sweet girl, one of the sweetest creatures in the world, has read every one of them. I wish you knew Miss Andrews, you would be delighted with her. She is netting herself the sweetest cloak you can imagine.'
Percy, Ossian, and Chatterton.
These things were but the clothes of romantic story-telling, walking bodiless about the world, while a poetry old enough to be astonishingly new was nurturing the body that was to stretch them for itself. Chatterton's ballads, imitations as they were, showed a sudden and novel feeling for mediæval colouring. Ossian, that book of majestic moments, carried imagination out again to stand between the wind and the hill. Scott disliked its vagueness, but it helped in preparing his world. Percy's Reliques, excused by their compiler on the frivolous ground of antiquarian interest, brought the rough voice and rude style of Sir Philip Sidney's blind beggar ringing across the centuries, and in those old tales, whose rhymes clash like sword on targe, Scott found the inspiration that Macpherson's disorderly, splendid flood swept down on other men.
Scott's life.