SPIRIT OF THE PUBLIC JOURNALS
THE WAVERLEY NOVELS.
Heroines.
The female characters in the Waverley Novels are touched with much grace and spirit, though they are not, upon the whole, brought so vividly to our minds as the men,—probably because they are more ideal. Such they must necessarily be. The course of woman's existence glides comparatively unobserved in the under-current of domestic life; and the records of past days furnish little note of their condition. Few materials are available from which the historical novelist can deduce an accurate notion of the relative situation of women in early times. We know very little either of the general extent of their cultivation and acquirements, or of the treatment which they received from men. On the latter point, we must not allow ourselves to be deceived by the poetical effusions of gallantry, and the false varnish of chivalrous devotion. It is to be feared that the practice of the days of chivalry was much at variance with its professions; and that women were degraded, as we always find them wherever civilization has made little progress. It was by command of Edward I. of England, the Mirror of Chivalry, one of the bravest knights in the host of the Crusaders, that two of the noblest ladies in Scotland were hung up in iron cages, exposed like wild beasts to the view of the populace. Facts like this mark the standard of public feeling, and may teach us that there was little real consideration for women in those times;—and where that is not found, there can be little refinement. Scantiness of information, and the necessity of assimilating to modern tastes a picture which, if it could have been obtained, would probably have been disagreeable, has obliged the Author of Waverley to draw much from the resources of his poetical mind in the depicting of female character. And wisely has he so done; for we regard many of the females in his tales only as beautiful and poetical creations; and we are gratified without being deceived. We find no fault with him for having made his Minna and Brenda beings such as the daughters of a Shetland Udaller, nearly a century and a half ago, were not likely to have been;—we blame him not because in his Rebecca, that most charming production of an imagination rich with images of nobleness and beauty, he has exhibited qualities incompatible with the real situation of the daughter of that most oppressed and abject being, a Jew of the twelfth century. It is plain that if Minna or Rebecca had been drawn with a strict regard to probability, and made just such as they were most likely to have been, one of the great objects of fiction would have been reversed: the reader would have been repelled instead of being attracted. This poetical tone pervades, more or less, the delineations of all his heroines; and the charm which it imparts, perhaps more than counterbalances the detrimental tendency of sameness. At the same time, we may add, that it is least exhibited when circumstances seem least to require it. His heroines are, on the whole, better treated, as such, than his heroes, who are, for the most part, thrown into the ring to be bandied about, the sport of circumstances;—owing almost all their interest to the events which thicken around them. Many of them exhibit no definite character, or, when they rise above nonentities, are not so much individuals as abstractions. A strong fraternal likeness to the vacillating Waverley does not raise them in our esteem. They seem too nearly imitations of the most faulty portion of that otherwise admirable tale.
Scenic Description.
Good as are the descriptions of quiescent objects, it is in his treatment of events,—of the visible operations of man, or of the elements,—that the author displays most power. What have we finer of its kind, than the storm in the Antiquary? The sullen sunset—the advancing tide—the rocks half hidden by the rising foam—the marks of promised safety fading from sight, and with them the hope they nourished—the ledge which the sufferers gained with difficulty—on the one side, a raging sea, and on the other, a barrier that forbade retreat! Guy Mannering contains another masterpiece—the night attack of Portanferry, witnessed by Bertram. We feel as though we were that person—we see and hear all of which his eyes and ears had cognizance; and the impression is the more strong, because the writer has told only that, and left the rest to our imagination. This illustrates one feature of the author's skill. He knows the effect producible by leaving circumstances in the incompleteness and obscurity in which they often present themselves to the senses of a single person; he tells just what that person could have perceived, and leaves the sketch to be finished by his reader. Thus, when Porteous is hurried away to execution, we attend his ruthless conductors, but we wait not to witness the last details, but flee with Butler from the scene of death, and looking back from afar, see through the lurid glare of torches a human figure dangling in the air—and the whole scene is more present to our minds, than if every successive incident had been regularly unfolded. Thus, when Ravenswood and his horse vanish from the sight of Colonel Ashton, we feel how the impressiveness and beauty of the description are heightened by placing us where the latter stood,—showing us no more than he could have witnessed, and bidding our imaginations to fill up the awful doubtful chasm.
That the Author of Waverley is a master of the pathetic, is evinced by several well-known passages. Such are the funeral of the fisherman's son in the Antiquary—the imprisonment and trial of Effie Deans, and the demeanour of the sister and the broken-hearted father—the short narrative of the smuggler in Redgauntlet—many parts of Kenilworth—and of that finest of tragic tales, the Bride of Lammermoor.
Plots.
The plots in the Waverley Novels generally display much ingenuity, and are interestingly involved; but there is not one in the conduct of which it would not be easy to point out a blemish. None have that completeness which constitutes one of the chief merits of Fielding's Tom Jones. There is always either an improbability, or a forced expedient, or an incongruous incident, or an unpleasant break, or too much intricacy, or a hurried conclusion. They are usually languid in the commencement, and abrupt in the close; too slowly opened, and too hastily summed up. Guy Mannering is one of those in which these two faults are least apparent. The plot of Peveril of the Peak might perhaps, on the whole, have been considered the best, if it had not been spoiled by the finale.