Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature - 4. Naturalism in England

by Georg Brandes

We have a really interesting counterpart to The Lady of the Lake in Wordsworth's White Doe of Rylstone, a narrative poem founded on one of the ballads in Percy's collection, and also begun in 1809. It is in this work that the poet of Rydal Mount, who probably felt the spirit of rivalry stir within him, approaches nearest to Scott's peculiar domain. No one would dream of denying that the feeling in Wordsworth's poem is much deeper. His dislike of dazzling virtues and brilliant vices has led him to choose a hero who, although an obedient son and a valiant knight, refuses, from a sense of duty, to follow his father and his brother when they raise the standard of revolt against Queen Elizabeth of England, and who, misunderstood and repudiated, is obliged, without taking his share of the danger, to witness his kinsmen's defeat and ignominious punishment. Wordsworth has endowed this hero with self-abnegation, fortitude, generosity, and Christian piety; but there is too much affectation of profundity in the poem, too much dragging in of the half-supernatural, too much sentimentality and unction. Scott viewed nature and the old customs with the eye of a lover of the chase, Wordsworth with the eye of the moralist. Wordsworth's ponderous cargo-boat ploughs its way heavily through the water; Scott's poet's skiff flies along with all sails set, leaving only light bubbles of fancy behind in the reader's memory; it is like the boat in the Third Canto of his poem, which flies so fast that

"The bubbles where they launched the boat
Were all unbroken and afloat,
Dancing in foam and ripple still,
When it had neared the mainland hill."

It is easy to understand that Scott's writings, with their glorification of the chivalrous virtues, of daring and courage, even when displayed by rebel chiefs, pirates, gipsies, smugglers, &c.; in short, with its tendency in the direction of Byronic partiality for the bold and wild, were, from one point of view, highly objectionable in the eyes of the moral and Christian poets of the Lake School. Coleridge charged his novels with "ministering to the depraved appetite for excitement, and creating sympathy for the vicious and infamous, solely because the fiend is daring"; and he concluded his ill-natured attack with the incorrect prophecy: "Not twenty lines of Scott's poetry will ever reach posterity; it has relation to nothing."

In 1812 the first two cantos of Childe Harold saw the light. Not long after their publication, Byron wrote a most friendly letter to Scott, containing a hearty apology for the foolish attack in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. The younger poet had hastily taunted and reproached the elder, not only with choosing as his favourite hero a mixture of felon and knight ("not quite a felon, yet but half a knight"), but with accepting payment for his works ("racking his brains for lucre, not for fame")—a thing which, in his youth, Byron's aristocratic pride prevented his doing, much as he stood in need of money. After he left England for the second time, he, too, learned to make his art a lucrative profession. He repented his rash condemnation of Scott as heartily as he repented all his other hasty judgments of the same nature, and the strained relationship between the two great and noble-hearted men gave way to the most friendly feeling.

The influence of Childe Harold on Scott's literary career was decisive. He was unbiassed enough to see plainly that he could not compete with Byron in narrative poetry, and he therefore determined to turn his attention to another branch of literature, that in which he was soon to stand unrivalled.

The various utterances on this subject, and all the utterances regarding Byron, which are to be found in Scott's Life and Letters testify to the kindly disposition and attractive frankness of the great Scottish author. In 1821 he said to a friend: "In truth, I have long given up poetry. I have had my day with the public; and being no great believer in poetical immortality, I was very well pleased to rise a winner, without continuing the game till I was beggared of any credit I had acquired. Besides, I felt the prudence of giving way before the more forcible and powerful genius of Byron. If I were either greedy, or jealous of poetical fame, I might comfort myself with the thought, that I would hesitate to strip myself for the contest so fearlessly as Byron does; or to command the wonder and terror of the public by exhibiting, in my own person, the sublime attitude of the dying gladiator. But with the old frankness of twenty years since, I will fairly own, that this same delicacy of mine may arise more from conscious want of vigour and inferiority, than from a delicate dislike to the nature of the conflict." And when, the year before his death, he was asked why he had relinquished poetry, he said quite simply: "Because Byron beat me." The gentleman with whom he was talking rejoined that he, for his part, remembered as many passages of his friend's poetry as of Byron's. Scott replied: "That may be, but he beat me out of the field in the description of the strong passions, and in deep-seated knowledge of the human heart." The recognition of this fact must have been a blow to Scott, but he could seek solace in the thought which he himself expressed thus: "If I had occasion to be mortified by the display of genius which threw into the shade such pretensions as I was then supposed to possess, I might console myself that, in my own case, the materials of mental happiness had been mingled in a greater proportion."

Waverley, published anonymously in February 1814, was the first of the long series of novels which made Scott and his country famous throughout the whole civilised world. These works appeared at the time when the conclusion of peace with France and the hopeful prospects of the country generally, had occasioned a special access of national pride. They are not works which, like those of the greatest writers, Goethe and Shelley, for instance, indicate different stages of their author's development and culture; nor are they works inspired by profoundly moving personal experiences; they are the mature productions of an inexhaustible gift of story-telling and an extraordinary talent for description both of men and things. They mark a distinct advance in two matters—the understanding of history, and the representation of the life of the middle and lower classes.

The historians of the eighteenth century, who saw, or expected, the realisation of the ideal in their own day, took up the position rather of orators than of authors; they occupied themselves with theoretical questions of government and civilisation, without consideration of the influence of climatic and geographical conditions, or of the past history of a nation—the conception of a nation as a race seldom suggesting itself to them. Sir Walter Scott, on the other hand, made it his endeavour as a writer of historical fiction to give a vivid impression of the peculiarities of certain periods and countries; and he felt the less temptation to endow his heroes with the characteristics of his own day, as he in his inmost heart preferred the bright, stirring life of the past to the colourless reasonableness of that of his own century.

A few years previously, Chateaubriand had, in Les Martyrs, made the first attempt to measure each age by its own standard, and to present the past to us in living pictures. But Scott was the real discoverer and first employer of that local colouring in literature which became the basis of the whole production of French Romanticism. Hugo, Mérimée, and Gautier took to it at once. And Scott's historic sense not only made him the pioneer of a whole school of poetry; it gave his unassuming novels an immense influence over the whole historical literature of the new century. It was, for example, his Ivanhoe, with its description of the strained relations between the Normans and the Saxons, which first suggested to Augustin Thierry the idea that the original force which produced such results as the exploits of Clovis, Charlemagne, and Hugo Capet, was the racial antagonism between the Gauls and the Franks. The man whose gift of insight into the inner life of the modern individual human being was so slight, and who in an age of peculiarly independent individual development, was hampered and biassed by the prejudices of patriotism, loyalty, and orthodox piety—this man, thanks to his vigorous Naturalism, had, when he observed these same individuals as a clan, as a nation, or as a race, a perfect understanding of their character as such. Accustomed as he was to reflect on the difference between Scotchmen and Englishmen, it was not unnatural that the idea of the racial antipathy between the Anglo-Saxons and the Normans should, as by an inspiration, occur to him; and his understanding in such matters makes his descriptions of the same value to the student of racial, as Byron's are to the student of individual, psychology.

And to this merit has to be added the great merit of his tales as descriptions of typical representatives of all classes of society. In the novels of the eighteenth century—Fielding's, for example—we pass from one tavern scene to another; in Scott's we are introduced into private life, with all its domestic details. The descriptions owe their peculiar excellence to the vigorous realism with which each separate personage is depicted. Englishmen have always specially prized in their authors the gift of describing with such distinct, tangible detail that the object described stands out in relief before the reader's eye; their sturdy, healthy intellects enjoy the graphic vigour. They like the poetical picture executed in such strong colours that we see it before us as if it were a coat of arms painted on a shield. Scott, as a novelist, gratified this taste. His readers gladly forgave him the terrible prolixity of his descriptions and his conversations, because the result was a graphic representation, attained either by enumerating a long list of attributes or by perpetual insistence upon some one characteristic trait. And there is no doubt, that, tiresome as his procedure may sometimes be, he is one of the greatest character portrayers in all literature. Romanticism has produced nothing finer than such female characters as Diana Vernon in Rob Roy and Jeanie Deans in The Heart of Midlothian, or such a historic portrait as Louis XI. in Quentin Durward.