| The London Magazine.] | [February, 1823. |
The author of Waverley is here himself again; and it is on English ground that he has come upon his feet. Peveril of the Peak is all but equal to the best of the Scotch Novels. It is no weaving up of old odds and ends; no lazy repetition of himself at second-hand, and the worse for the wear. Peveril is all new, good,[[65]] full of life, spirit, character, bustle, incident, and expectation; nothing is wanting to make it quite equal to the very best of his former productions, but that it has not the same intense interest, nor the same preternatural and overpowering imagery. Fenella, a deaf and dumb dwarf, attached to the Countess of Derby, is, indeed, an exquisitely drawn character, and exerts a sort of quaint, apparently magic influence over the scene; but her connection with it is so capricious, so ambiguous, and at last so improbable, as to produce or to leave none of those thrilling and awe-struck impressions which were so irresistibly interwoven with some former delineations of the same kind. But as a sketch, as a picture, the little fairy attendant of the Queen of Man is one of the most beautiful and interesting the author ever struck out with his enchanting and enchanted pencil. The present Novel comes the nearest to Old Mortality, both in the class of subjects of which it treats, and in the indefatigable spirit and hurried movement of the execution. It differs from that noble master-piece in this, that Sir Walter (or whoever else, in the devil’s name, it is) has not infused the same depth or loftiness of sentiment into his English Roundheads and Cavaliers, as into his Scotch Covenanters and Royalists; that the characters are left more in the outlines and dead colouring; and though the incidents follow one another as rapidly, and have great variety and contrast, there is not the same accumulation of interest, the same thickening of the plot, nor the same thronging together of eager and complicated groups upon the canvas. His English imagination is not so fully peopled with character, manners, and sentiment, as his Scotch understanding is; but, by the mass, they are not ‘thinly scattered to make up a show.’ There is cut and come again. We say this the more willingly, because we were among those who conceived there was a falling off, a running to seed, in some of the later productions of the author. The Fortunes of Nigel showed a resuscitation in his powers; that is, a disposition to take new ground, and proceed with real pains and unabated vigour; and in his Peveril, we think he has completed his victory over excusable idleness and an inexcusable disregard of reputation. He may now go on upon a fresh lease, and write ten more Novels, just as good or as bad as he pleases!
There were two things that we used to admire of old in this author, and that we have had occasion to admire anew in the present instance, the extreme life of mind or naturalness displayed in the descriptions, and the magnanimity and freedom from bigotry and prejudice shewn in the drawing of the characters. This last quality is the more remarkable, as the reputed author is accused of being a thorough-paced partisan in his own person,—intolerant, mercenary, mean; a professed toad-eater, a sturdy hack, a pitiful retailer or suborner of infamous slanders, a literary Jack Ketch, who would greedily sacrifice any one of another way of thinking as a victim to prejudice and power, and yet would do it by other hands, rather than appear in it himself. Can this be all true of the author of Waverley; and does he deal out such fine and heaped justice to all sects and parties in time past? Perhaps (if so) one of these extremes accounts for the other; and, as ‘he knows all qualities with a learned spirit,’ probably he may be aware of this practical defect in himself, and be determined to shew to posterity, that when his own interest was not concerned, he was as free from that nauseous and pettifogging bigotry, as a mere matter of speculation, as any man could be. As a novel-writer, he gives the devil his due, and he gives no more to a saint. He treats human nature scurvily, yet handsomely; that is, much as it deserves; and, if it is the same person who is the author of the Scotch novels, and who has a secret moving hand in certain Scotch Newspapers and Magazines, we may fairly characterize him as
‘The wisest, meanest of mankind.’
Among other characters in the work before us, is that of Ned Christian, a cold-blooded hypocrite, pander, and intriguer; yet a man of prodigious talent,—of great versatility,—of unalterable self-possession and good humour, and with a power to personate agreeably, and to the life, any character he pleased. Might not such a man have written the Scotch Novels?
It has been suggested, with great modesty, that the Author of Waverley was like Shakspeare. We beg leave with equal modesty to suggest another comparison, which we think much nearer the mark; and that is, to the writings of Mr. Cobbett. The peculiarity of Shakspeare’s mind is (we humbly apprehend) that sort of power which completely levels the distinction between imagination and reality. His mind properly has wings, and it is indifferent to him whether he treads the air or walks the earth. He makes us acquainted with things we did not know before, as if we knew them familiarly. Now Sir Walter Scott only recals to us what we already knew—he deals wholly in realities, or what are commonly received as such; and so does Mr. Cobbett. Both are downright matter-of-fact minds, and have little, if any, of that power which throws into objects more than ordinary opinion or feeling connects with them. Naturalness is the forte of both these writers. They have a strong, vivid, bodily perception (so to speak), a material intuition of what they write about. All their ideas are concrete, and not abstracted. Mention an old, dilapidated castle, and a thriving, substantial brick mansion to Sir Walter Scott, and he immediately has an actual image of some such objects conjured up in his mind, and describes them as he has seen them, with all their local circumstances, and so as to bring back some similar recollection to the reader’s mind, as if there had been just two such buildings in the place where he was brought up. But this revived reality is all; there is no new light thrown upon the subject. It is a sort of poetic memory. Good. So set Mr. Cobbett to work upon the subject of our agricultural distress, and with quite as much poetry, as much of the picturesque, and in as good English as Sir Walter Scott writes Scotch, he will describe you to the life a turnip-field with the green sprouts glittering in the sun, the turnips frozen to a mere clod, the breath of the oxen steaming near that are biting it, and the dumb patience of the silly sheep. We should like to know whether he is not as great a hand at this sort of ocular demonstration as Sir Walter himself? He shall describe a Scotch heath, or an American wilderness against Sir Walter for a thousand pounds. Then for character; who does it with more master-strokes, with richer gusto, or a greater number of palpable hits than the Editor of the Political Register? Again, as to pathos, let Mr. Cobbett tell a story of a pretty servant girl or soldier’s wife, left by her sweetheart, or shot dead in his arms, and see if he will not come near the Heart of Mid Lothian? You may say it is not this or that, it is coarse, low, the man has no feeling, but it is nature, and that’s quite enough. The truth is, these two original geniuses have found out a secret; they write as they feel. It is just like school boys being able to read as they would talk. It is a very awkward difficulty to get over, but being once accomplished, the effect is prodigious. Then, there is the same strong sarcastic vein of roystering pot-house humour in the one as in the other; and as for giving both sides of a question, nobody has done that more effectually than Mr. Cobbett in the course of his different writings. His style also is as good, nay, far better: and if it should be said that Mr. Cobbett sometimes turns blackguard, it cannot be affirmed that he is a cat’s paw—which is the dernier resort of humanity, into which Sir Walter has retreated, and shuts himself up in it impregnably as in a fortress. To conclude this parallel, we will be bold to say in illustration of our argument, that there is hardly a single page in the Scotch Novels which Mr. Cobbett could not write, if he set his mind to it; and there is not a single page in Shakspeare, either the best or the worst, which he could write for his life, and let him try ever so. Such is the genius of the three men.
So much by way of preface to our account of the most magnanimous Peveril of the Peak, and now for extracts. We have not time or limits to give the story, which, however, relates to the Civil Wars of England; but we shall furnish our readers with a specimen of the spirit with which it is written; it is the description of the meeting of Peveril with the dwarf Fenella, where she tries to prevent his going to meet Alice Bridgenorth at the Goddard Crovann-stone in the Isle of Man.
[The whole of Chap. XVI. of Peveril of the Peak is set out].
We have been led to such length by the beauty of this description that we have not room for another extract, or we would give that master-piece of wit and irony, the scene where Peveril meets with Ganlesse and Smith at a low alehouse, on his route through Derbyshire.