[19] “Le bout du monde,” meaning, he never thought of going any farther. [↑]
[20] Compare, if you can get at the book in any library, my article on ‘Home and its Economies’ in the ‘Contemporary Review’ for May. [↑]
FORS CLAVIGERA.
LETTER XXXI.
Of the four great English tale-tellers whose dynasties have set or risen within my own memory—Miss Edgeworth, Scott, Dickens, and Thackeray—I find myself greatly at pause in conjecturing, however dimly, what essential good has been effected by them, though they all had the best intentions. Of the essential mischief done by them, there is, unhappily, no doubt whatever. Miss Edgeworth made her morality so impertinent that, since her time, it has only been with fear and trembling that any good novelist has ventured to show the slightest bias in favour of the Ten Commandments. Scott made his romance so ridiculous, that, since his day, one can’t help fancying helmets were always pasteboard, and horses were always hobby. Dickens made everybody laugh, or cry, so that they could not go about their business till they had got their faces in wrinkles; and Thackeray settled like a meatfly on whatever one had got for dinner, and made one sick of it.
That, on the other hand, at least Miss Edgeworth and Scott have indeed some inevitable influence for good, I am the more disposed to think, because nobody now will read them. Dickens is said to have made people good-natured. If he did, I wonder what sort of natures they had before! Thackeray is similarly asserted to have chastised and repressed flunkeydom,—which it greatly puzzles me to hear, because, as far as I can see, there isn’t a carriage now left in all the Row with anybody sitting inside it: the people who ought to have been in it are, every one, hanging on behind the carriage in front.
What good these writers have done, is therefore, to me, I repeat, extremely doubtful. But what good Scott has in him to do, I find no words full enough to tell. His ideal of honour in men and women is inbred, indisputable; fresh as the air of his mountains; firm as their rocks. His conception of purity in woman is even higher than Dante’s; his reverence for the filial relation, as deep as Virgil’s; his sympathy universal;—there is no rank or condition of men of which he has not shown the loveliest aspect; his code of moral principle is entirely defined, yet taught with a reserved subtlety like Nature’s own, so that none but the most earnest readers perceive the intention: and his opinions on all practical subjects are final; the consummate decisions of accurate and inevitable common sense, tempered by the most graceful kindness.
That he had the one weakness—I will not call it fault—of desiring to possess more and more of the actual soil of the land which was so rich to his imagination, and so dear to his pride; and that, by this postern-gate of idolatry, entered other taints of folly and fault, punished by supreme misery, and atoned for by a generosity and solemn courage more admirable than the unsullied wisdom of his happier days, I have ceased to lament: for all these things make him only the more perfect to us as an example, because he is not exempt from common failings, and has his appointed portion in common pain.
I said we were to learn from him the true relations of Master and Servant; and learning these, there is little left for us to learn; but, on every subject of immediate and vital interest to us, we shall find, as we study his life and words, that both are as authoritative as they are clear. Of his impartiality of judgment, I think it is enough, once for all, to bid you observe that, though himself, by all inherited disposition and accidental circumstances, prejudiced in favour of the Stewart cause, the aristocratic character, and the Catholic religion,—the only perfectly noble character in his first novel is that of a Hanoverian colonel,[1] and the most exquisitely finished and heroic character in all his novels, that of a Presbyterian milkmaid.