THE SCOTCH NOVELS AND SCOTCH
HISTORY
Like many another innocent, no doubt, I was seduced not long ago by the potent spell of Mr. Andrew Lang's name into reading his voluminous History of Scotland. Being too, like Mr. Lang, sealed of the tribe of Sir Walter, and knowing in a general way some of the romantic features of Scotch annals, I was led to suppose that these bulky volumes would be crammed from cover to cover with the pageantry of fair Romance. Alas, I soon learned, as I have so often learned before, that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing; and I was taught, moreover, a new application of several well-worn lines of Milton. Amid the inextricable feuds of Britons, Scots, Picts, and English; amid the incomprehensible medley of Bruces, Balliols, Stuarts, Douglases, Plantagenets, and Tudors; amid the horrid tumult of Roberts, Davids, Jameses, Malcolms (may their tribes decrease!), Mr. Lang's reader, if he be of alien blood and foreign shores, wanders helpless and utterly bewildered. On leaving that selva oscura I felt not unlike Milton's courageous hero (in courage only, I trust) before the realm of Chaos and eldest Night, where naught was perceptible but eternal anarchy and noise of endless wars. Yet with this bold adventurer it might be said by me:
I come no spy,
With purpose to explore or to disturb
The secrets of your realm; but by constraint
Wandering this darksome desert, as my way
Led through your spacious empire up to light.
For throughout the labyrinth of all this anfractuous narrative there was indeed one guiding ray of light. As often as the author by way of anecdote or allusion—and happily this occurred pretty frequently—mentioned the works of Scott, a new and powerful interest was given to the page. The very name of Scott seemed providentially symbolical of his office in literature, and through him Scots history has become a theme of significance to all the world.
On the other hand, one is equally impressed by the fact that the novels owe much of their vitality to the manner in which they voice the spirit of the national life; and we recognise the truth, often maintained and as often disputed, that the final verdict on a novelist's work is generally determined by the authenticity of his portraiture, not of individuals, but of a people, and consequently by the lasting significance of the phase of society or national life portrayed.
The conditions of the novel should seem in this respect to be quite different from those of the poem. We are conscious within ourselves of some principle of isolation and exclusion—the principium individuationis, as the old schoolmen called it—that obstructs the completion of our being, of some contracting force of nature that dwarfs our sympathies with our fellow-men, that hinders the development of our full humanity, and denies the validity of our hopes; and the office of the imagination and of the imaginative arts is for a while to break down the walls of this narrowing individuality and to bestow on us the illusion of unconfined liberty.
But if the end of the arts is the same, their methods are various, and this variety extends even to the different genres of literature. The manner of the epic, and in a still higher degree of the tragedy, is so to arouse the will and understanding that their clogging limitations seem to be swept away, until through our sympathy with the hero we feel ourselves to be acting and speaking the great passions of humanity in their fullest and freest scope; for this reason we call the characters of the poem types, and we believe that the poet under the impulse of his inspiration is carried into a region above our vision, where, like the exalted souls in Plato's dream, he beholds face to face the great ideas of which our worldly life and circumstances are but faulty copies. In this way Achilles stands as the perfect warrior, and Odysseus as the enduring man of wiles; Hamlet is the man of doubts, and Satan the creature of rebellious pride. It may be that this effort or inspiration of the poet to represent mankind in idealised form will account in part for the peculiar tinge of melancholy that is commonly an attribute of the artistic temperament,—for the brooding uncertainty of Shakespeare, if as many think Hamlet is the true voice of his heart, for the feeling of baffled despair which led Goethe to create Faust, and for the self-tormenting of Childe Harold. It is because the dissolving power of genius and the personality of the man can never be quite reconciled; he is detached from nature and attached to her at the same time. On the one hand his genius draws him to contemplate life with the disinterestedness of a mind free from the attachments of the individual, while on the other hand his own personality, often of the most ardent character, drags him irresistibly to seek the satisfaction of individual emotions. Like the Empedocles of Matthew Arnold, baffled in the ineffable longing to escape themselves, these bearers of the divine light are haled unwillingly
Back to this meadow of calamity,
This uncongenial place, this human life.