Scott and reality.
Ballads and sagas and the historical reading to which they had given their savour; a free open air life, and a broad, humorous understanding of men; these were the things that Scott had behind him when Cervantes moved him to write narrative, and when the gold that shines through the dress of education in the stories of Maria Edgeworth made him fall in love with local as well as historical colour, anxious to draw his nation as she had drawn hers, and to paint Scottish character in prose as Burns had painted it in verse. The historical character of his work should not disguise from us its more vital qualities. Hazlitt, whose keen eye was not to be put out by the gold and pomp of trappings and armour, notices that Scott represents a return to the real. He is noticing the most invigorating quality of Romanticism. Scott's importance is not his because he wrote historical novels, but because his historical novels were humane. He had found out, as Hazlitt says, that 'there is no romance like the romance of real life.'
His technique.
'As for his technique, there is no need to praise him, who had so many other virtues, for that of delicate craftsmanship, which he had not. He was not a clever performer, but an honest one whose methods were no more elaborate than himself. Dumas describes them in that chapter of the Histoire de mes Bêtes in which he discusses his own:—
'His plan was to be tedious, mortally tedious, often for half a volume, sometimes for a volume.
'But during this volume he posed his characters; during this volume he made so minute a description of their physiques, characters, and habits; you learnt so well how they dressed, how they walked, how they talked, that when, at the beginning of the second volume, one of these characters found himself in some danger, you exclaimed to yourself:
'"What, that poor gentleman in an applegreen coat, who limped as he walked, and lisped as he talked, how is he going to get out of that?"
'And you were very much astonished, after being bored for half a volume, a volume, sometimes indeed for a volume and a half; you were astonished to find that you were enormously concerned for the gentleman who lisped in talking, limped in walking, and had an applegreen coat.'
The sensation of reading a Waverley Novel is that of leaning on the parapet of a bridge on a summer day, watching the sunlight on a twig that lies motionless in a backwater. The day is so calm and the sunlight so pleasant that we continue watching the twig for a time quite disproportionate to the interest we feel in it, until, when it is at last carried into the main current, we follow its swirling progress down the stream, and are no more able to take our eyes from it than if we were watching the drowning of ourselves.
Improvisation.
Scott knew very well the disadvantages of improvisation, of piling up his interest and our own together. But he could work in no other manner. He said: 'There is one way to give novelty, to depend for success on the interest of a well contrived story. But, wo's me! that requires thought, consideration—the writing out of a regular plan or plot—above all, the adhering to one, which I can never do, for the ideas rise as I write, and bear such a disproportioned extent to that which each occupied at the first concoction, that (cocksnowns!) I shall never be able to take the trouble.' His was a mind entirely different from Poe's, or Mérimée's, or Flaubert's, those scrupulous technicians with whom was the future of Romanticism, and it was an artistic virtue in him to realise the fact, to proceed on his own course, leaving as he went large, rough, incomparable things, as impressive as the boulder stones of which the country people say that a giant threw them as he passed.
His character and work.
His swift, confused writing gets its effect because he never asked too much from it. He never tried to do anything with it beyond the description of his characters and the telling of their story. He had no need to catch an atmosphere by subtleties of language. His conception of the beings and life of another age did not make them different except in externals, from our own. He did not, like Gautier or Flaubert, regard the past as a miraculous time in which it was possible to be oneself, or in which true feeling was not veiled in inexactitudes. Very simple himself, he did not feel in the present those laxities of sensation or inexactitudes of expression that made the past a place of refuge. He was not dissatisfied with life as he found it, and was not disposed to alter it when he dressed it for a masquerade. Nor was that difficult for him. His mind was full of the stage properties of the past, and, as he walked about, he lived in any time he chose and was the same in all of them. He lived with humanity rather than in any particular half-century, and did not feel, like Peacock, the need of dainty, careful movement in order not to break the fabric he was building. Maid Marian is the same story as Ivanhoe. Scott seems to have stepped straight out of his story to write it, Peacock to be looking a long way back, and building very skilfully the replica of something he had never seen but in a peculiarly happy vision. Scott is quite at home in his tale, and can treat it as rudely as he likes. Peacock seems to be playing very warily on the fragile keys of a spinet.