As a novelist, Scott has been blamed for not imparting a more useful moral to his fictions, and for dwelling with too inconsiderate an interest on the chivalric illusions of the past. To charges of this nature all writers are liable. Mankind are divided into two classes; and he who belongs to the one will ever incur the reproach of not seeing through the medium of the other. Certain it is, that we, with utterly different notions on political truths from the great writer who is no more, might feel some regret—some natural pain—that that cause which we believe the best, was not honoured by his advocacy; but when we reflect on the real influence of his works, we are satisfied they have been directed to the noblest ends, and have embraced the largest circle of human interests. We do not speak of the delight he has poured forth over the earth—of the lonely hours he has charmed—of the sad hearts he has beguiled—of the beauty and the music which he has summoned to a world where all travail and none repose; this, indeed, is something—this, indeed, is a moral—this, indeed, has been a benefit to mankind. And this is a new corroborant of one among the noblest of intellectual truths, viz. that the books which please, are always books that, in one sense, benefit; and that the work which is largely and permanently popular—which sways, moulds, and softens the universal heart—cannot appeal to vulgar and unworthy passions (such appeals are never widely or long triumphant!); the delight it occasions is a proof of the moral it inspires.
But this power to charm and to beguile is not that moral excellence to which we refer. Scott has been the first great genius—Fielding alone excepted—who invited our thorough and uncondescending sympathy to the wide mass of the human family—who has stricken (for in this artificial world it requires an effort) into our hearts a love and a respect for those chosen from the people. Shakspeare has not done this—Shakspeare paints the follies of the mob with a strong and unfriendly hand. Where, in Skakspeare, is there a Jeanie Deans? Take up which you will of those numerous works which have appeared, from Waverley to the Chronicles of the Canongate,—open where you please, you will find portraits from the people—and your interest keeping watch beside the poor man's hearth. Not, in Scott, as they were in the dramatists of our language, are the peasant, the artificer, the farmer, dragged on the stage merely to be laughed at for their brogue, and made to seem ridiculous because they are useful.
He paints them, it is true, in their natural language, but the language is subservient to the character; he does not bow the man to the phrase, but the phrase to the man. Neither does he flatter on the one hand, as he does not slight on the other. Unlike the maudlin pastoralists of France he contents himself with the simple truth—he contrasts the dark shadows of Meg Merrilies, or of Edie Ochiltree, with the holy and pure lights that redeem and sanctify them—he gives us the poor, even to the gipsey and the beggar, as they really are—contented, if our interest is excited, and knowing that nature is sufficient to excite it. From the palaces of kings—from the tents of warriors, he comes—equally at home with man in all aspects—to the cotter's hearth:—he bids us turn from the pomp of the Plantagenets to bow the knee to the poor Jew's daughter—he makes us sicken at the hollowness of the royal Rothsay, to sympathize with the honest love of Hugh the smith. No never was there one—not even Burns himself—who forced us more intimately to acknowledge, or more deeply to feel, that
"The rank is but the guinea stamp,
The man's the gowd, for a' that."
Scott, is not, we apprehend, justly liable to the charge of wanting a sound moral—even a great political moral—(and political morals are the greatest of all)—in the general tenor of works which have compelled the highest classes to examine and respect the lowest. In this, with far less learning, far less abstract philosophy, than Fielding, he is only exceeded by him in one character—(and that, indeed, the most admirable in English fiction)—the character of Parson Adams. Jeanie Deans is worth a thousand such as Fanny Andrews. Fielding, Le Sage, and Cervantes are the only three writers, since the world began, with whom, as a novelist, he can be compared. And perhaps he excels them, as Voltaire excelled all the writers of his nation, not by the superior merits of one work, but by the brilliant aggregate of many. Tom Jones, Gil Blas, Don Quixote, are, without doubt, greater, much greater, productions than Waverley; but the authors of Tom Jones, Gil Blas, and even of Don Quixote, have not manifested the same fertile and mighty genius as author of the Waverley Novels.
And that genius—seemingly so inexhaustible—is quenched at length! We can be charmed no more—the eloquent tongue is mute—the master's wand is broken up—the right hand hath forgot its cunning-the cord that is loosened was indeed of silver—and the bowl that is broken at the dark well was of gold beyond all price.
When a great man dies, he leaves a chasm which eternity cannot fill. Others succeed to his fame—but never to the exact place which he held in the world's eye;—they may be greater than the one we have lost—but they are not he. Shakspeare built not his throne on the same site as Homer—nor Scott on that whence Shakspeare looked down upon the universe. The gap which Scott leaves in the world is the token of the space he filled in the homage of his times. A hundred ages hence our posterity will still see that wide interval untenanted—a vast and mighty era in the intellectual world, which will prove how spacious were "the city and the temple, whose summit has reached to Heaven."