Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 / Devoted to Literature and National Policy

by Various

In his notes to 'Quentin Durward,' Scott declares his belief that there can be little doubt that the first gypsies consisted originally of Hindus, who left their native land when it was invaded by Timur or Tamerlane, and that their language is a dialect of Hindustanee. That the gypsies were Hindus, and outcast Hindus or Pariahs at that, could be no secret to Scott. That he should have made Hayraddin in his doctrines marvellously true to the very life to certain of this class, indicates a degree either of knowledge or of intuition (it may have been either) which is at least remarkable.

The reader has probably learned to consider the Hindu Pariah as a merely wretched outcast, ignorant, vulgar, and oppressed. Such is not, however, exactly their status. Whatever their social rank may be, the Pariahs—the undoubted ancestors of the gypsies—are the authors in India of a great mass of philosophy and literature, embracing nearly all that land has ever produced which is tinctured with independence or wit. In confirmation of which I beg leave to cite the following passages from that extremely entertaining, well-edited, and elegantly published little work, the 'Strange Surprising Adventures of the Venerable Goroo Simple and his Five Disciples':

'The literature of the Hindoos owes but little to the hereditary claimants to the sole possession of divine light and knowledge. On the contrary, with the many things which the Brahmins are forbidden to touch, all science, if left to them alone, would soon stagnate, and clever men, whose genius cannot be held in trammels, therefore soon become outcasts and swell the number of Pariars in consequence of their very pursuit of knowledge. * * * To the writings of the Poorrachchameiyans, a sect of Pariars odious in the eyes of a Brahman, the Tamuls owe the greater part of works on science. * * * To the Vallooran sect of Pariars, particularly shunned by the Brahmans, Hindoo literature is indebted almost exclusively for the many moral poems and books of aphorisms which are its chief pride.

'This class of literature' (satiric humor and fables) 'emanated chiefly from those despised outcasts, the Pariars, the very men who (using keener spectacles than Dr. Robertson, our historian of Ancient India, did, who singularly became the panegyrist of Gentoo subdivisions) saw that to bind human intellect and human energy within the wire fences of Hindoo castes is as impossible as to shut up the winds of heaven in a temple built by man's hand, and boldly thought for themselves.'

Of the literary Vallooran Pariah outcasts and scientific Poorrachchameiyans, we know from the best authority—Father Beschi—that they form society of six degrees or sects, the fifth of which, when five Fridays occur in a month, celebrate it avec de grandes abominations, while the sixth 'admits the real existence of nothing—except, perhaps, God.' This last is a mere guess on the part of the good father. It is beyond conjecture that we have here another of those strange Oriental sects, 'atheistic' in its highest school and identical in its nature with that of the House of Wisdom of Cairo, and with the Templars; and if Scott's gypsy Hayraddin Maugrabin is to be supposed one of that type of Hindu outcasts, which were of all others most hateful to the orthodox Moslem invader, we cannot sufficiently admire the appropriateness with which doctrines which were actually held by the most deeply initiated among the Pariahs were put into his mouth. To have made a merely vulgar, nothing-believing, and as little reflecting gypsy, as philosophical as the wanderer in 'Quentin Durward,' would have been absurd. There is a vigor, an earnestness in his creed, which betrays culture and thought, and which is marvellously appropriate if we regard him as a wandering scion of the outcast Pariah illuminati of India.

Did our author owe this insight to erudition or to poetic intuition? In either case we discover a depth which few would have surmised. It was once said of Scott, that he was a millionaire of genius whose wealth was all in small change—that his scenes and characters were all massed from a vast collection of little details. This would be equivalent to declaring that he was a great novelist without a great idea. Perhaps this is true, but the clairvoyance of genius which seems to manifest itself in the two characters which I have already examined, and the cautious manner in which he has treated them, would appear to prove that he possessed a rarer gift than that of 'great ideas'—the power of controlling them. Such ideas may make reformers, critics, politicians, essayists—but they generally ruin a novelist—and Scott knew it.

A third character belonging to the class under consideration, is Henbane Dwining, the 'pottingar,' apothecary or 'leech,' in the novel of 'The Fair Maid of Perth.'

This man is rather developed by his deeds than his words, and these are prompted by two motives, terrible vindictiveness and the pride of superior knowledge. He is vile from the former, and yet almost heroic from the latter, for it is briefly impossible to make any man intensely self-reliant, and base this self-reliance on great learning in men and books, without displaying in him some elements of superiority. He is so radically bad that by contrast one of the greatest villains in Scottish history, Sir John Ramorney, appears rather gray than black; and yet we dislike him less than the knight, possibly because we know that men of the Dwining stamp, when they have had the control of nations, often do good simply from the dictates of superior wisdom—the wisdom of the serpent—which, no Ramorney ever did. The skill with which the crawling, paltry leech controls his fierce lord; the contempt for his power and pride shown in Dwining's adroit sneers, and above all, the ease with which the latter casts into the shade Ramorney's fancied superiority in wickedness, is well set forth—and such a character could only have been conceived by deep study of the motives and agencies which formed it. To do so, Scott had recourse to the same Oriental source—the same fearful school of atheism which in another and higher form gave birth to the Templar and the gypsy. 'I have studied,' says Dwining, 'among the sages of Granada, where the fiery-souled Moor lifts high his deadly dagger as it drops with his enemy's blood, and avows the doctrine which the pallid Christian practises, though, coward-like, he dare not name it.' His sneers at the existence of a devil, at all 'prejudices,' at religion, above all, at brute strength and every power save that of intellect, are perfectly Oriental—not however of the Oriental Sufi, or of the initiated in the House of Wisdom, whose pantheistic Idealism went hand in hand with a faith in benefiting mankind, and which taught forgiveness, equality, and love, but rather that corrupted Asiatic vanity of wisdom which abounded among the disciples of Aristotle and of Averroes in Spain, and which was entirely material. I err, strictly speaking, therefore, when I speak of this as the same Oriental school, though in a certain sense it had a common origin—that of believing in the infinite power of human wisdom. Both are embraced indeed in the beguiling eritis sicut Deus, 'ye shall be as God,' uttered by the serpent to Eve.

Quite subordinate as regards its position among the actors of the novel, yet extremely interesting in a historical point of view, is the character of Jasper Dryfesdale the steward of the Douglas family, in 'The Abbot.' In this man Scott has happily combined the sentiment of absolute feudal devotion to his superiors with a gloomy fatalism learned 'among the fierce sectaries of Lower Germany.' If carefully studied, Dryfesdale will be found to be, on the whole, the most morally instructive character in the entire range of Scott's writings. In the first place, he illustrates the fact, so little noted by the advocates of loyalty, aristocracy, 'devoted retainers,' and 'faithful vassals,' that all such fidelity carried beyond the balance of a harmony of interests, results in an insensibility to moral accountability. Thus in the Southern States, masters often refer with pride to the fact that a certain negro, who will freely pillage in other quarters, will 'never steal at home.' History shows that the man who surrenders himself entirely to the will of another begins at once to cast on his superior all responsibility for his own acts. Such dependence and evasion is of itself far worse than the bold unbelief which is to the last degree self-reliant; which seeks no substitute, dreads no labor, scorns all mastery, and aims at the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Such unbelief may possibly end in finding religious truth after its devious errors, but what shall be said of those who would have men sin as slaves?

Singularly and appropriately allied to a resignation of moral accountability from feudal attachment, is the contemptible and cowardly doctrine of fatalism, which Dryfesdale also professes. It is not with him the philosophic doctrine of the concurring impulses of circumstance, or of natural laws, but rather the stupendously nonsensical notion of the Arabian kismet, that from the beginning of time every event was fore-arranged as in a fairy tale, and that all which is, is simply the acting out of a libretto written before the play began—a belief revived in the last century by readers of Leibnitz, who were truer than the great German himself to the consequences of his doctrine, which he simply evaded.[15] In coupling this humiliating and superstitious means of evading moral accountability with the same principle as derived from feudal devotion, Scott, consciously or unconsciously, displayed genius, and at the same time indirectly attacked that system of society to which he was specially devoted. So true is it that genius instinctively tends to set forth the truth, be the predilections of its possessor what they may. And indeed, as Scott nowhere shows in any way that he, for his part, regarded the blind fidelity of the steward as other than admirable, it may be that he was guided rather by instinct than will, in thus pointing out the great evil resulting from a formally aristocratic state of society. Such as it is, it is well worth studying in these times, when the principles of republicanism and aristocracy are brought face to face at war among us, firstly in the contest between the South and the North, and secondly in the rapidly growing division between the friends of the Union, and the treasonable 'Copperheads,' who consist of men of selfish, aristocratic tendencies, and their natural allies, the refuse of the population.