BURNS'S MONUMENT
[6] In this respect I venture to think all Scotland errs. Many houses throughout the country, built roughly with a rude and irregular but solid mason-work, were made points of light in the landscape by these washes of colour which poor dwellings retain. There is a yellow which I remember on many old houses in which the stains of time and weather produced varieties of tone almost as agreeable as the mellowing of marble under the same influences, which are now stripped into native roughness and rise in sombre grey, sometimes almost black, abstracting a much-needed warmth from the aspect of the country round.
CHAPTER III
THE SHAKSPEARE OF SCOTLAND
There are many variations in degree of the greatest human gifts, but they are few in kind. The name we have ventured to place at the head of this chapter is one not so great as that of Shakspeare, not so all-embracing—though widely-embracing beyond any other second—not so ideal, not so profound. Walter Scott penetrated with a luminous revelation all that was within his scope, the most different kinds and classes of men, those whom he loved (and he loved all whom it was possible to love) and the few whom he hated, with the same comprehension and power of disclosure. But Shakspeare was not restrained by the limits of any personal scope or knowledge. He knew Lear and Macbeth, and Hamlet and Prospero, though they were beings only of his own creation. He could embody the loftiest passion in true flesh and blood, and show us how a man can be moved by jealousy or ambition in the highest superlative degree and yet be a man with all the claims upon our understanding and pity that are possessed by any brother of our own. Nothing like Lear ever came in our Scott's way: that extraordinary embodiment of human passion and weakness, the forlorn and awful strength of the aged and miserable, did not present itself to his large and genial gaze. It would not have occurred to him perhaps had he lived to the age of Methuselah. He knew not those horrors and dreadful depths of humanity that could make such tragic passion possible. But he had his revenge in one way even upon Shakspeare. Dogberry and Verges, as types of the muddle-headed old watch—pompous, confused, and self-important—are always diverting; but they would have been men not all ridiculous had Scott taken them in hand—real creatures of flesh and blood, not watchmen in the abstract. Our greater poet did not take trouble enough to make them individual, his fancy carrying him otherwhere, and leaving him scarce the time to put his jotting down. To Shakspeare the great ideals whom he almost alone has been able to make into flesh and blood; to Scott all the surrounding world, the men as we meet them about the common thoroughfares of life. He knows no Rosalind nor Imogen, but on the other hand Jeanie Deans and Jenny Headrigg would have been impossible to his great predecessor. Both, we may remark, are incapable of a young hero—the Claudios and the Bertrams being if anything a trifle worse than Henry Morton and Young Lovel. But whereas Shakspeare is greatest above that line of the conventional ideal, it is below that Sir Walter is famous. The one has no restriction, however high he may soar; the other finds nothing so common that he cannot make it immortal.
ST. GILES'S FROM PRINCES STREET
It is, however, especially in the breadth and largeness of a humanity which has scarcely any limit to its sympathy and understanding that the great romancist of Scotland resembles the greatest of English poets. They are both so great, so broad, so little restrained by any individual limitations, that a perverse criticism has made this catholic and all-comprehending nature a kind of reproach to both, as though that great and limpid mirror of their minds, in which all nature was reflected, was less noble than the sharp face of a stone which can catch but one ray. They were both subject to political prejudices and prepossessions. Shakspeare has made of many a youth of the nineteenth century an ardent Lancastrian, ready to pluck a red rose with Somerset and die for Margaret and her prince; and Scott in like manner has made many a Jacobite, though in the latter case our novelist is too full of sense even in the midst of his own inclinations to become ever an out-and-out partisan. But, except these prepossessions, they have no parti pris. Every faction renders up its soul of meaning, the most diverse figures unclose themselves side by side. The wit, the scholar, the true soldier, the braggart and thief, the Jew and the Christian, the Hamlet, hero of all time, and Shallow and Slender from the fat pastures of English rural life, come all together, each as true as if on him alone the poet's eye had fixed. And Scott is like him, setting before us with unerring pencil the old superstitious despot of mediæval France, the bustling pedant of St. James's, the ploughmen and shepherds, the churchmen, the Border reivers and Highland caterans, the broad country lying under a natural illumination, without strain or effort, large and temperate as the day. Neither in the greatest poet nor the great romancer is there any force put upon the natural fulness of life to twist its record into a narrow circle with one motive only. It is the round world and all that it inhabits, the grandeur and divinity of a universe, that delights them. Their view is large as the vision of God, or as nearly so as is given to mortal eyes. It is in this, above all, that they resemble each other. In degree Shakspeare, it need not be said, is all-transcendent, reaching heights such as no other man has reached in delineation and creation: but Scott is of his splendid species, one of his kind, the only one among all the many sons of genius with whom this island has been blessed, for whom the boldest could make such a claim.