THE 
 
 WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 zAn ^Appreciation 
 
 BY 
 
 CHARLES ALEXANDER YOUNG 
 
 GLASGOW 
 JAMES MACLEHOSE & SONS 
 
 PUBLISHERS TO THE UNIVERSITY 
 1907 
 
Glasgow: printed at the university press hy 
 robert maclehose and co. ltd. 
 
hfi 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 Charles Alexander Young, the author of this 
 Appreciation, was born on New- Year's Day, 1880, 
 and perished in the earthquake of April, 1905, 
 at Dharmsala, India. He was educated at the 
 High School of Stirling and the University of 
 Glasgow, and for both school and college he 
 had a very loyal affection. On leaving Glasgow 
 he spent a year in London " cramming " for 
 the Indian Civil Service examination, in which 
 he obtained second place, and this was followed 
 by a year's residence at Christ Church, Oxford, 
 where, as at Glasgow, he made many true friends. 
 This book was written in the summer of 1901 
 for the Honours Degree in English Literature 
 and History, but far from being a task, much 
 love was given to the labour of writing it. 
 
 The choice of subject was no random one. 
 This appreciation is but one of a long series 
 
 OHA * 1*4 
 
vl PREFACE 
 
 of literary excursions dating from childhood. 
 The first, it is worthy of note, was Malcolm 
 Douglas, a romance written in a round childish 
 hand in loving imitation of Ivanhoe and the 
 Lady of the Lake. The Waverley Novels opened 
 the way to the great country of Bookland, and 
 Charles Young travelled far and wide within its 
 ample borders through a vastly varied landscape, 
 as these Essays show, but always with kindly 
 recollections of the chivalrous writer whom he 
 had first met in the enchanted land. The 
 feverish hurry of the Scottish University sessions 
 is followed by long tranquil vacations, and these 
 were spent in reading or writing at home or 
 in ever -to -be -remembered holidays in the 
 Highlands. One Easter Holiday was spent in 
 a walking tour through the valleys of Tweed 
 and Yarrow. It was during these vacations that 
 he made many of his literary essais, including 
 " The Waverley Novels." 
 
 Two reasons have had weight in determining 
 the publication of this book. It is thought 
 worthy of publication as a criticism filled with 
 insight into these qualities of manliness and 
 
PREFACE vii 
 
 greatness of heart which Sir Walter Scott 
 possessed, and which give their most abiding 
 charm to the Waverley Novels. Secondly, there 
 are many friends, and Charles Young had indeed 
 a genius for friendship, to whom this book will 
 be precious as a memory of their chivalrous, 
 enthusiastic comrade. For such no words are 
 needed telling them of the charm and real 
 worth of their dead friend, nor had they any 
 doubt but that Charles Young was made for 
 great achievements. But for the world at 
 large — 
 
 "Thy leaf has perished in the green, 
 
 And, while we breathe beneath the sun, 
 The world which credits what is done, 
 Is cold to all that might have been." 
 
 On page 22 we read: " In 18 10 there was 
 a strong probability that Scott would go to 
 India as a judge. These changes might not 
 have checked his literary production, and after 
 all the impulse to write was the strongest 
 impulse of his life. But had he gone to India 
 or to the West Indies he would not in all 
 probability have written the Scotch Novels/' Of 
 
viii PREFACE 
 
 Charles Young, too, it may be said : " After all, 
 the impulse to write was the strongest impulse 
 of his life," but, alas, he did join the Indian 
 Civil Service and sailed for India in October, 
 1903. For eighteen months there came long 
 letters vivid with descriptions of foreign places 
 or of new friends and telling of the glamour of 
 the East. Sometimes they were sad, sometimes 
 mere mirth and madness. Then there came 
 earthquake stilling the rapid pen and the fertile 
 brain. Now there is silence. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The Making of a Novelist, - i 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 The Romance from Walpole to " Waverley," 29 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 The Waverley Novels: The Novelist at 
 
 Work : Externals, 49 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 The Waverley Novels: History, Romance, 
 
 Reality, ------ 83 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 The Waverley Novels : Character, Humour, 
 
 Tragedy, Religion, - - - - 107 
 
 Epilogue, - - - - - - ~ I 34 
 
CHAPTER I 
 THE MAKING OF A NOVELIST 
 
 " The noble hart that harbours vertuous thought 
 And is with child of glorious great intent, 
 Can never rest until it forth have brought 
 The eternall brood of glorie excellent." 
 
 Spenser. 
 
 " ' I am Imagynityf,' quod he, ' idel was I never.' " 
 
 Langland. 
 
 In one of his most characteristic essays, Robert 
 Louis Stevenson traces, in fanciful fashion, the 
 ancestral elements which went to the making of 
 himself, and tells how he was present in old 
 Scotland at many a scene of peace and war, from 
 the days in which he tended the beard of Cardinal 
 Beaton to those in which he sailed with Scott amid 
 the Hebrides, or lit the first beacon on the Bell 
 Rock. Had Walter Scott been so minded, he 
 might have traced his ancestral adventures with 
 even greater vividness and fidelity. For when 
 the Scotts of Harden gathered round the banner 
 of Buccleuch or rode many a midnight foray 
 against their neighbours over the Border ; when 
 
2 WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 Auld Wat wedded the Flower of Yarrow ; when 
 his son chose Meikle Mou'ed Meg rather than 
 the gallows ; when Beardie lost his land but kept 
 his beard ; when Robert Scott invested his entire 
 capital (borrowed too) in a mettled hunter ; when 
 the elder Walter Scott followed in Edinburgh the 
 profession of a Writer to the Signet — a Novelist 
 was in the making. Most men owe their natural 
 being to their forbears ; not many owe to them 
 their intellectual bias and literary temperament. 
 But Scott's literary debt to his ancestors was 
 enormous, though he perhaps repaid it with 
 interest by many a tribute in prose and verse. 
 Sprung from a race nurtured within the walls of 
 Border peels, and trained in raids on mountain 
 and moor, reared in the traditions of a family to 
 whom war and adventure had been as the very 
 breath of their nostrils, feeling within himself 
 stir of the old warrior blood, impulse of the old 
 adventurous spirit, charm of the legendary Border 
 Hills, it was Scott's peculiar privilege to tell in 
 song and romance and legend what had been the 
 life, what the aspirations, what the poetry of a 
 people who hitherto, apart from the anonymous 
 ballad-writers, had lacked their singer. Scott 
 owed to his ancestors another debt, of no less 
 account. Critics admit that, in his writings, the 
 men and women of history are not mere names, 
 
THE MAKING OF A NOVELIST 3 
 
 but living beings of flesh and blood. One deep 
 source of this historic imagination lies in the life 
 of his forefathers. Many of them were known 
 to history, and of few things was Scott more 
 proud. But then these very men and women 
 were also the chief characters in intimate story 
 and family legend, often humorous, often familiar, 
 presenting them as very living people indeed. 
 How it must have stirred the heart of the future 
 Quarter-Master of Light Horse to hear of 
 William Boltfoot, the lame ancestor who yet 
 became a mighty warrior! It was no influence 
 of friend or writer, no philosophic conviction, 
 which taught Walter Scott his way of looking 
 at the past. It came to him with his blood, as 
 part of his inheritance. For him the Border 
 wastes were peopled, its peels re-roofed, its raids 
 re-ridden, long before the days of childhood were 
 over. 
 
 Walter Scott was born at Edinburgh in 1771. 
 Time and place were alike important for the future 
 Scottish novelist. It was only a few years since 
 the Bute administration had roused in England 
 such an outburst of angry feeling against the 
 Scots that all the healing influences of the Seven 
 Years' War had passed away, and Scotland had 
 been thrown back upon herself in proud and angry 
 isolation. Historians are agreed that the first 
 
4 WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 decade of Scott's life saw the widest severance 
 of the two peoples in the latter half of the 18 th 
 century, and point out that during those years 
 was formed the new Scottish Tory Party, the 
 party with which Scott was afterwards connected. 
 " From this decade date most of the characteristic 
 features of the national type," writes the latest 
 historian of the period (Craik, " A Century of 
 Scottish History," vol. ii.). Scott was at this time 
 a mere child ; still it is interesting to note what 
 was then the character of the national spirit. 
 Again, the Edinburgh of his young days was 
 an admirable training-ground. The city, no 
 longer pent within its steepy limits, was beginning 
 to fling its white arms to the sea, and to present 
 that combination of past and present which is its 
 peculiar charm. When Scott was a boy the change 
 was merely in progress ; ancient habit still held 
 sway, and the old town was still the centre of 
 Scottish life. Here were the great law-courts, 
 where pled a race of lawyers unsurpassed in 
 idiosyncrasy of character and speech ; here the 
 country gentlemen still had their high and narrow 
 town houses ; here noble and caddie, delicate lady 
 and fishwife, farmer and merchant, still mingled 
 on the steep causeways, so that the streets of 
 Edinburgh provided a panorama of almost every 
 feature of Scottish life. To have spent his 
 
THE MAKING OF A NOVELIST 5 
 
 youth in such a city was no small boon to 
 the future author of " Guy Mannering " and 
 " Redgauntlet." « 
 
 It would be impertinent to relate at length the 
 life of the novelist up till the year of the publi- 
 cation of " Waverley." What is of value is to 
 trace, in the pre-Waverley years, the future 
 novelist in the making. Scott's life, of course, 
 is all of a piece ; the lawyer, the country gentle- 
 man, the officer of light horse, the poet, the 
 novelist — all are but manifestations of one and 
 the same man. Still it is possible to abstract from 
 the detail of a very full and busy youth and man- 
 hood the distinctive features of the poet and 
 novelist. Here, apart from Lockhart, great help 
 is given by the fragment of autobiography, by 
 passages in the novels, and by random reminis- 
 cences in the journal. The Autobiographical 
 fragment has this peculiar interest : it was written 
 in 1808, six years before "Waverley" was pub- 
 lished, and, though revised and annotated in 1826, 
 nothing was added of any importance. Yet even 
 this small history shows signs of what was to be 
 hereafter. Here is an account of the youth of 
 a novelist by one who did not know what was 
 to be his main business in life. All Scott's history 
 is but the tale of his unconscious drifting into 
 what was to be his real occupation, but there is 
 
6 WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 no more piquant illustration of his unconscious- 
 ness than this fragment. 
 
 The shaping power of his childhood must be 
 briefly related. He was a delicate child, and his first 
 years were spent at his grandfather's farm of Sandy- 
 knowe. Here his mind drank its first draughts 
 from those sources which were ever afterwards 
 to be the springs of his imaginative life. By his 
 grandfather and the neighbours, by his grand- 
 mother, whose mind seems to have been a treasury 
 of Border story, and by his aunt, who possessed 
 considerable knowledge of literature, his earliest 
 literary and historical tastes were formed. Here 
 he became inspired with that sentiment of 
 Jacobitism which produced the most touching 
 passages in " Waverley " and " Redgauntlet " ; 
 here Border tale and ballad took the place of the 
 usual nursery rhyme and fairy tale. The passage 
 in " Marmion " relating the impressions of those 
 days is well known, but no biographer seems to 
 have noted how much of Scott's own history is 
 contained in the account which Frank Osbaldi- 
 stone gives of his nurse's tales of the Border 
 ("Rob Roy," vol. i. p. 51). 1 Old Mabel is 
 an Englishwoman, and tells her tales from the 
 English point of view. But otherwise the infancy 
 described is Scott's own, and it was his own youth- 
 
 1 The references throughout are to Constable's Reprint of the Novels 
 in 48 volumes. 
 
THE MAKING OF A NOVELIST 7 
 
 ful mind which was fed upon the rhymes of the 
 North Country and the tales of the Black Douglas 
 and Wat the Devil. Sandyknowe seems also to 
 be the source of another feature of his later work. 
 There he learned to love and cherished in his 
 memory the old-fashioned country life of southern 
 Scotland which is described in " Guy Mannering " 
 and " The Black Dwarf " and " The Monastery." 
 His schooldays at Edinburgh require little 
 examination : are they not recorded in the letters 
 of Alan Fairford and Darsie Latimer? His own 
 recollections and those of others fortunately reveal 
 very characteristic traits. For exact scholarship 
 he showed little taste, but he won praise for his 
 appreciation of the meaning of the classic writers, 
 and even tried his hand, now and then, at a poetic 
 version. In Edinburgh school-life street fights 
 were then very common ; indeed, Borrow's 
 <c Lavengro " is a witness that they remained so 
 until far into the next century. Down to the days 
 of his quarrel with Gourgand, Scott was always 
 eager for a fight, and his prominence in these 
 " bickers," recalled in " Redgauntlet " and in the 
 Greenbreeks episode of the General Introduction, 
 need cause no surprise. For the rest, it is remark- 
 able that his chief fame at school was derived 
 from his power of story-telling, with which he 
 charmed his companions in the yards. All this 
 
8 WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 time, too, he was reading in that desultory fashion 
 which gave him such a wide knowledge of general 
 literature. He himself selects three books for 
 special mention as the favourites of his school- 
 time — Shakespeare, Ossian, Spenser. No better 
 intellectual food could have nurtured the great 
 master of romance. 
 
 His short attendance at college classes before 
 entering his father's office had little effect upon 
 his after-life. It may be noticed, however, that 
 as he did not attend the Greek class he soon 
 forgot what little Greek he knew. It may not 
 be unimportant to note that the great romantic, 
 so careless of form, had no direct acquaintance 
 with the masters of art in literature. More 
 important were two illnesses from which Scott 
 suffered at this time, at the close of his school- 
 days and during his brief attendance at the Arts 
 Classes. To recruit his health after the former 
 illness he was sent to Kelso, a visit which he often 
 repeated, and thus was renewed the connection 
 with the Border country. He traces much to 
 these visits. At Kelso he read Latin authors with 
 the schoolmaster ; whatever exact classical scholar- 
 ship he possessed dated from this time. Here he 
 read Percy's " Reliques," his first introduction to 
 the ballads as literature ; and here, too, natural 
 scenery first charmed his eye, but derived its chief 
 
THE MAKING OF A NOVELIST 9 
 
 charm, as was always the case with Scott, from 
 its association of beauty and legend. During 
 his second illness he was confined to his room at 
 Edinburgh and forbidden to speak or exert 
 himself in any way. Turning to reading as his 
 chief resource, he was able to add still greater 
 treasures to the storehouse of his mind. 
 
 Henceforward, for some years, the outward 
 course of his life seemed to be that of an ordinary 
 young Scots lawyer, with little promise of future 
 poet or novelist. In 1786 he became an apprentice 
 to his father; in 1788, probably because his 
 ambition was fired by the new friends he made 
 in the Civil Law Class of that year, he began 
 to study for the Scottish Bar. He was called to 
 the Bar in 1792, and there, until he was appointed 
 Sheriff-Substitute of Selkirk in 1799, his chief 
 hopes lay. The outward show of these years is 
 commonplace enough ; but whoever looks beneath 
 the surface to his reading, his thoughts, his 
 pursuits, will see clearly the novelist in training. 
 Indeed, when later writers are remembered, one 
 might almost draw up a prescription for the 
 making of a Scots man of letters. He must be 
 born in Edinburgh, be afflicted in infancy and 
 youth with ill-health, attend Arts Classes in a 
 very desultory fashion, have a particular antipathy 
 to the class of Greek, and a peculiar genius for 
 
io WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 the truant's wandering. He must be bred to the 
 Scottish Bar, yet his love for law must decrease 
 on further acquaintance, and end, for the most 
 part, in a keen appreciation of its humours. The 
 external business of his life must never find an 
 abiding place in the inner sanctuary of his soul, 
 where shall dwell love of books and love of 
 adventure, and slowly, consciously or uncon- 
 sciously, he must be drawn from the entangling 
 circumstance of business to the more or less 
 imperative pursuit of literature. And yet, many 
 might follow the prescription and never attain to 
 a moiety of the genius of Walter Scott or Robert 
 Louis Stevenson. 
 
 Tracing the influences which form a writer's 
 character, one naturally asks what books he read. 
 For Scott's early studies one has but to turn to the 
 opening of " Waverley " — Shakespeare, Milton, 
 Drayton, Spenser ; the romantic literature of Italy ; 
 English and Scottish Chronicles ; memoirs and 
 romances of old France — Edward Waverley was 
 not the only student of those writers. Nor are 
 Waverley's reveries, which peopled the library 
 with figures of the past, less autobiographical. In 
 December, 1825, Scott writes in the Journal: — 
 " Since I was five years old I cannot remember 
 the time when I had not some ideal part to play 
 for my own solitary amusement." The effect of 
 
THE MAKING OF A NOVELIST n 
 
 such reading upon the young heir of Waverley- 
 Honour is described as no unmixed good ; readers 
 will remember how the youth suffered from a 
 temporary attack of Quixotism. But as early as 
 his college days, Scott's sound sense asserted itself, 
 and even in the course of an illness he was glad 
 to turn from pure romance to history, chronicle, 
 and book of travels. He is probably the most 
 industrious idler on record. Spanish, French, 
 Italian, German he never learned as a scholar 
 learns ; but he could read the literature of these 
 languages with considerable ease, and his first 
 literary attempts show that he was in fact no mean 
 German student. One fact characterises his read- 
 ing at every period of his life; it was always 
 wide and desultory — Lockhart gives some idea of 
 the contents of his note-books for 1792, the year 
 of his calling to the Bar. His studies at this 
 time comprised Anglo-Saxon and Middle-English 
 literature and language, Teutonic alphabets, Norse 
 translation, odd facts in history such as the 
 pecuniary distress of Charles I., the discovery of 
 ballads, the second sight, and original poetry. 
 What other youthful advocate who passed his 
 trials in that year had a mind so filled with curious 
 knowledge? Of a truth it was not Law only 
 whose call Scott was hearing in 1792. 
 
 The pursuits and recreations of the apprentice 
 
12 WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 and advocate were also part of his training. He 
 roamed the country with his fellow students and 
 fellow apprentices, and mostly on foot, for Saunders 
 Fairford, as Alan was to recall later, was no believer 
 in a large allowance of pocket-money. How 
 much his descriptions of Scottish manners owe 
 to these travels on foot one can never fully know. 
 They must have supplied him with much material 
 for the future; for to the country people of 
 Scotland a pedestrian is one of themselves, and 
 their intercourse, information, and hospitality are 
 always at his disposal. Further afield, however, 
 Scott had to journey on horseback. It was in this 
 fashion, in pursuit of his legal duties, that he first 
 entered the Perthshire Highlands, a district to 
 which his friendship with many country gentlemen, 
 notably Buchanan of Cambusmore and Ramsay of 
 Ochtertyre, often led him to return. His lame- 
 ness, then as afterwards, did not prevent him from 
 engaging in difficult adventures and perilous 
 sports. The spirit of these times is perhaps best 
 expressed in a passage of the Journal for March, 
 1827 : " There is a touch of the old spirit in me 
 yet that bids me brave the tempest — the spirit 
 that, in spite of manifold infirmities, made me a 
 roaring boy in my youth, a desperate climber, a 
 bold rider, a deep drinker and a stout player at 
 single-stick." While such were his pursuits 
 
THE MAKING OF A NOVELIST 13 
 
 abroad, at home he was no less actively employed. 
 Apart from real hard work devoted to law studies, 
 he entered into the debating societies for which 
 Edinburgh has always been noted; and here his 
 chosen subjects — Northern antiquities, Ossian, the 
 feudal system — were characteristic. Wild con- 
 viviality of the nature of the ' high jinks ' in 
 " Guy Mannering " was then the fashion among 
 Edinburgh youth, and c Colonel Grogg ' was 
 always ready for any gay revel — to sail with the 
 Clerks in their lugger and lay the foundation of 
 the sea-knowledge displayed in " The Pirate," to 
 gain at Boyle's, Fortune's, and Walker's his 
 intimate acquaintance with tavern life, or to drink 
 delight of battle in street-fight or play-house 
 riot. 
 
 Scott's writings show no trace of any disposition 
 towards vice ; the ideals of the writer are always 
 high and honourable. The same high and 
 honourable ideals governed his early days, for, 
 in the midst of the manifold and boisterous 
 pursuits of youth, a delicate influence refined his 
 spirit and touched it to finer issues. In 1790 
 he fell in love with Miss Stuart Belches and loved 
 her ever afterwards as few men have loved. This 
 love-affair, ultimately unsuccessful, has been much 
 discussed ; lately, so far have literary ideas 
 travelled from the silence of Scott and the reticence 
 
i 4 WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 of Lockhart, a book has been written upon it. 
 It is wise, for the present purpose, to note only 
 its effect upon his literary development. The 
 absorption in the love of one woman just at the 
 time when ideals are formed, the ideal grace which 
 loss and sorrow would throw round such a one, 
 the indifference to other types of womanhood — 
 this youthful experience must have moulded the 
 author's conception of woman as heroine, a being 
 removed from the contagion and stress of common 
 life. His love-affair, however, stimulated his 
 production of original lyric poetry ; it was the 
 immediate cause of his first appearance in print ; 
 it inspired some of the best passages in his longer 
 poems, and flung a tender melancholy round many 
 scenes in the novels. His lost love lives again 
 in " Redgauntlet " as the Lady of the Green 
 Mantle, and such unfortunate early love gives 
 pathos to the character of Jonathan Oldbuck. 
 Personal experience must have led Scott to sym- 
 pathise with Tressilian in such a passage as this: 
 " Nothing is perhaps more dangerous to the future 
 happiness of men of deep thought and retired 
 habits, than the entertaining an early, long, and 
 unfortunate attachment. It frequently sinks so 
 deep into the mind, that it becomes their dream 
 by night and their vision by day — mixes itself 
 with every source of interest and enjoyment ; and 
 
THE MAKING OF A NOVELIST 15 
 
 when blighted and withered by final disappoint- 
 ment, it seems as if the springs of the heart were 
 dried up along with it " (" Kenilworth," vol. ii. 
 p. 162). His sound sense, his wide interests, his 
 brave spirit of revolt against circumstance, saved. 
 Scott from the dangers he himself describes. But 
 the most touching words in the Journal show how 
 deep, too deep for healing, was the wound. 
 
 Men are not made by private pursuits or 
 personal experience alone. The society in which 
 one lives, the spirit of one's nation, also mould 
 the mind. Scott had equal good fortune here. 
 The Edinburgh of his early youth, like the Edin- 
 burgh of his childhood, was still a medley of old 
 and new, where old ladies professed Jacobitism, 
 where the law-lords talked broad Scots, and where 
 country gentlemen displayed, in the drawing- 
 rooms of the New Town, the manners of former 
 days. Writing of Scotland under Pitt, before the 
 French Revolution, Sir Henry Craik says : " It 
 is hard to conceive an atmosphere more inspiring 
 for the generation then growing up. The fashions 
 of a byegone age had not passed away, but they 
 were held with the genial ease of those who 
 thought them indisputable and knew them 
 unassailed. There was but little of angry con- 
 tention where all were practically of one mind. 
 The range of society was large enough to embrace 
 
1 6 WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 many varieties, and yet small enough to admit 
 pursuit of the unrestrained freedom of social 
 intercourse, where each man was known with all 
 his idiosyncrasies and foibles." It is true that the 
 last decade of the century brought about many 
 changes, hastened the dissolution of the old 
 organisation of country life, divided public men 
 into two warring parties. Yet again the same 
 historian notes that these years witnessed the most 
 enthusiastic study of Scottish antiquities, litera- 
 ture, and ballads, for " this very generation 
 which saw the older types undergoing disintegra- 
 tion became the most careful to mark them, and 
 the most sedulous to preserve their memory." It 
 is little wonder that from such a soil sprung 
 Scotland's greatest man of letters. 
 
 Here, perhaps, is the proper place to note Scott's 
 attitude to the French Revolution. All know how 
 it arose like a new dawn upon the imaginative 
 horizon of many of his young contemporaries in 
 England. The novel, among other forms of 
 literature, received a new stimulus and became 
 a vehicle for revolutionary doctrines. From the 
 first, however, Scott bitterly opposed the Revolu- 
 tion. The most he ever admitted (and he did 
 so in " The Antiquary ") was that there were some 
 sound Constitutional Whigs in the Constituent 
 Assembly. Afterwards, when his political phil- 
 
THE MAKING OF A NOVELIST 17 
 
 osophy is discussed, it will be seen how natural 
 was his opposition, how opposed were the 
 Revolutionary doctrines to all his ideals of society. 
 But it was a real loss not to have felt the generous 
 impulses of that enthusiastic time and never to 
 have appreciated the true greatness of the move- 
 ment. Many excuses — training, environment, 
 friends — may be urged ; Sir Henry Craik states 
 that in Scotland, after the Revolution, " to 
 proclaim oneself an adherent of reform was 
 now to assume a character of reckless political 
 profligacy." Still it is to be remarked, not 
 without blame, that while Coleridge and Southey 
 were being fired with new love for mankind and 
 dreaming of an ideal republic on the Susquehanna, 
 Scott was leading an anti-Jacobin riot in the 
 Edinburgh theatre. More satisfactory, of greater 
 effect upon his literary development, was his 
 public action in later years of the war. As the 
 struggle went on, it assumed, more and more, a 
 national aspect ; it became, more and more, a 
 contest with an ambitious despot. Hence it 
 appealed not merely to blind opposition to change 
 or to national prejudice, but to generous ideas 
 and patriotic pride. It is well known how much 
 Scott's poetry was indebted to the war. For the 
 training of a novelist it was more important that 
 Scott took a leading part in the formation and 
 
1 8 WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 service of the Edinburgh Light Horse. Few- 
 chapters in the novels are more inspiriting than 
 those which tell of the pomp of war, the delight 
 of battle, the stir of the charge — the onset at 
 Drumclog, the siege of Torquilstone, the fight on 
 the North Inch. To write vividly of such scenes 
 was little trouble to the old Quartermaster of 
 Horse, who had made many a march and taken 
 part in many a manoeuvre in the years when 
 invasion threatened our coasts. Nor was it 
 unimportant that he who was to write of historical 
 personages and events should have lived through 
 such a crisis in his country's history. 
 
 By the time of the enrolment of the Light 
 Horse, Scott had made his first appearance in 
 print as the translator of " Lenore." Whoever 
 treats of Scott's early days must note his lateness 
 in writing; it was not till 1796 that he printed 
 any poetry, while " Waverley " did not appear 
 till 1 8 14. But his biography, the reminiscences 
 of friends, his own novels, show that he suffered, 
 quite as much as other men more conscious of 
 their vocation, from the glorious great intent 
 within him, struggling to be free. His friend, 
 Irving, tells how, at college and in the office, he 
 continued the story-telling habits of his boyhood, 
 and how he spent spare afternoons on the crags 
 of Arthur's seat, weaving endless romances of 
 
THE MAKING OF A NOVELIST 19 
 
 chivalry. The critic may even note, with a smile, 
 the young story-teller's chief trouble : he could 
 not finish his tale. The Autobiography tells what 
 a master he was, even then, in the art of narration. 
 " In crossing Magus Moor, near St. Andrews, 
 the spirit moved me to give a picture of the 
 assassination of the Archbishop to some fellow- 
 travellers with whom I was accidentally associated, 
 and one of them, though well acquainted with 
 the story, protested my narrative had frightened 
 away his night's sleep." At this time, too, we 
 hear of a poem " Guiscard and Matilda," and of 
 another, " The Conquest of Granada." It is 
 customary to say that Scott pictures his own youth 
 in Alan Fairford. Unquestionably this is very 
 true in some ways. But Scott seems to have 
 omitted the literary side of his nature. Why is 
 it only Darsie Latimer who incurs the censure of 
 old Fairford for " scouring the country like a land- 
 louper" ? And O, why does Alan dislike Ariosto ? 
 For the distraction and vexation Scott must have 
 suffered when Law pulled one way and Poetry 
 another, one must look in the early pages of " Rob 
 Roy." Every reader will remember the dis- 
 comfiture of poor Frank when his father discovers, 
 from the unfortunate verses on the Black Prince, 
 that his son was a greater blockhead than he 
 supposed. There is much autobiography in the 
 
20 WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 early part of this novel. Scott was never so 
 averse to business as he makes out his young hero 
 to be; he had a very strong desire to please his 
 father, and, for a time, some real liking for law. 
 But his father was quite as contemptuous of litera- 
 ture as the senior partner of Osbaldistone and 
 Tresham, while young Scott was quite as devoted 
 to Ariosto and probably almost as much given 
 to day-dreaming as young Frank. Indeed, critics 
 seem to ignore the latter side of Scott's character — 
 his poetic sensibility, his surrender to rapt imagin- 
 ings, his perpetual dwelling in the ideal world. 
 Some would make him out to be a level-headed 
 Scotsman, who stood very firmly upon this earth. 
 This is to give only a partial representation. 
 Stoic that he was, Scott always hid the imaginative 
 side of his life. But the Journal again comes 
 to the rescue, and from it we learn his youthful 
 love of solitude and self-communion, and how, 
 from the first, " my life, though not without its 
 fits of waking and strong exertion, has been a 
 sort of dream, spent in 
 
 'Chewing the cud of sweet and bitter fancy.'" 
 
 Such being his innermost nature, such the 
 subjects to which his secret thoughts were drawn, 
 the lateness of his literary birth is all the more 
 surprising, while it is no less strange that he should 
 
THE MAKING OF A NOVELIST 21 
 
 not have found his proper literary medium until 
 late in life. Of his lateness in appearing as an 
 author, many explanations have been sought. 
 Professor Saintsbury (" Sir Walter Scott." Famous 
 Scots Series) sums up the various arguments under 
 three heads. There was paternal discouragement. 
 While a young man he had no need to earn money 
 by writing at a time when writing was wretchedly 
 paid. Finally, the new age of romantic poetry 
 had not yet begun. Without question, these 
 were all retarding influences, but perhaps the chief 
 explanation is to be found in Scott's constant 
 attitude to literature. It is one of the blemishes 
 of a singularly noble artist that he did not 
 sufficiently respect and honour his art. Literature 
 he was, in a way, ashamed of, and if she brought 
 him not only his greatest joy, but also his greatest 
 sorrow, it seems but the righteous retribution of 
 a mistress he had loved but not respected. He 
 would appear the man of letters only in his leisure 
 hours or in the solitude of his study ; to the world 
 he preferred to appear in some other character — 
 the advocate, the Clerk of Session, or the country 
 gentleman. In youth he was thus, for a time, 
 really ambitious of success at the Bar, and not 
 quite in earnest in his literary aspirations ; and 
 as late as 1803 Wordsworth's impression of Scott 
 was " that on the whole he attached much less 
 
22 WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 importance to his literary labours or reputation 
 than to his bodily sports, exercises, and social 
 amusements." One has always the suspicion that 
 he might not have become a novelist at all. He 
 might certainly never have become a Scots novelist. 
 Lovers of Burns will note with interest that in 
 the year of his marriage Scott meditated emigra- 
 tion to the West Indies. In 1810 there was a 
 strong probability that he would go to India as 
 a judge. These changes might not have checked 
 his literary production ; he had hopes that a 
 sojourn in India would give him new material 
 for poetry, and, after all, the impulse to write was 
 the strongest impulse of his life. But had he 
 gone to the West Indies or to India, he would 
 not, in all likelihood, have written the Scotch 
 novels. 
 
 Why he was so late in coming into his own 
 kingdom is perhaps easier to explain. In the first 
 place, during his early manhood the novel had 
 fallen into disrepute, and was associated with the 
 discredited Minerva Press. In the second place, 
 Scott was a poet, and poetry comes before prose 
 both in national and individual lives. His 
 romantic dreams, his fiery chivalry, were what 
 first sought expression, and they found their 
 natural vehicle in verse. But it was not only 
 Byron's popularity which led Scott to abandon 
 
THE MAKING OF A NOVELIST 23 
 
 narrative poetry. His verse expressed but one 
 side of his nature. To utter his whole criticism 
 of life he had to seek another medium, and he 
 found it in the novel. 
 
 Scott's early romantic poetry will find mention 
 in another chapter ; the novelist in making is 
 better seen in two other sections of the pre- 
 Waverley compositions. In some ways the Border 
 Minstrelsy is even more important than the 
 narrative poems. The collecting of material gave 
 him the opportunity of becoming acquainted with 
 all sorts and conditions of men, every variety of 
 scene and custom, in what were still the fastnesses 
 of southern Scotland, for from 1792 to 1797 Scott 
 made annual raids into Liddesdale. His com- 
 panion, Mr. Shortreed, has summed up, in an 
 historic phrase, what all this was to mean to him : 
 " He was makin 5 himsell a' the time." The 
 ballads owed much to these rambles, but the novels 
 owed more. There could have been no better 
 training than the editing of the Minstrelsy. The 
 preface and notes were not only his first efforts 
 at sustained narrative in prose ; in them he first 
 found an opportunity of displaying his legendary 
 lore, his vast historical knowledge, his acquaint- 
 ance with the rich circumstance and detail of life. 
 Moreover, to edit well such a collection of poems 
 was the fittest task which could have been set a 
 
24 WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 future historical novelist. The ballads had all a 
 story to tell, and many of their stories were of 
 the past. In collating the different versions the 
 editor's critical faculties were put to the test ; he 
 had to select the form which had the fewest faults, 
 in which the main action was most effectively 
 developed, incident duly subordinated, and char- 
 acter best unfolded. As for the ballads' picture 
 of the past, of no literature could the spirit have 
 been more congenial to Scott. For the past of 
 the ballad-writers is the past of the Waverley 
 Novels. The heroes of the poems are described 
 as they lived, with the helmets and jack-boots 
 they wore, and the number of buttons on their 
 sleeves ; we see them ' birling at the wine,' follow- 
 ing the fallow deer, swimming the ford in the 
 c wan water ' or tiding at the pin of their lady's 
 bower. The pathos, the chivalry, the adventure 
 of old times are all there, finely expressed. But 
 humour is also permitted. " Kinmont Willie " 
 is a huge practical joke in the heroic vein, none 
 the less humorous that the background is serious, 
 and the stories of Jamie Telfer and of the Blind 
 Harper are told with delightful irony. Incidents 
 of the most romantic description, strange figures 
 from Fairyland or the grim under-world, often 
 interrupt the story, which has always, however, a 
 background of historical fact, or solid, everyday 
 
THE MAKING OF A NOVELIST 25 
 
 country life. The same combination was to 
 characterise the Waverley Novels. 
 
 The long narrative poems have many of the 
 qualities of the prose romances. They have the 
 same power of telling a story ; nay, interweaving 
 the fortunes of private individuals with public 
 events, they even tell a story in the same way. 
 The fortunes of the lovers both in " The Lady 
 of the Lake " and in " Waverley " are involved 
 in the course of public affairs, and neither in poem 
 nor romance is the love affair the reader's chief 
 interest. But, after all, Hutton ("Scott." English 
 Men of Letters Series) is right in declaring that 
 the Border Minstrelsy is " more commensurate in 
 range " with Scott's genius than the long narrative 
 poems. In the latter his humour, his command 
 of dialect, his interest in contemporary affairs, his 
 power of painting manners, present or past, could 
 not be fully developed. " The Lady of the 
 Lake " is a poem perfectly charming in its kind. 
 But how different would have been the story of 
 Ellen Douglas had it been the subject of a prose 
 romance ! Alongside nobler features the ludicrous 
 aspect of the clan system would have been 
 developed, life in the island would have been 
 elaborated in full detail, minor characters among 
 the Highlanders would have been more than mere 
 names, the heir of Armandave's love-story would 
 
26 WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 have been told at length, the reader would have 
 shared the hospitality of some worthy Stirling 
 burgher, and heard his opinion on the King's 
 treatment of Douglas, and the old Broad Street 
 would have been alive again, with its motley 
 crowd, unseemly jest, and insolent behaviour. 
 Scott nowhere shows consciousness of his limita- 
 tions in verse, though his turning to the novel 
 really proves his need of a new medium. But 
 even in the poems he seeks fuller expression. The 
 introduction to the cantos of " Marmion " may 
 or may not be out of place ; they at least show 
 how the poet already felt that narrative romantic 
 poetry did not contain all that he had to say on 
 life. There is a trace of the same struggle for 
 freedom in the introductions to " The Bridal " 
 and " Harold the Dauntless," though Scott is 
 here at his old trick of deceiving the critics and 
 is scarcely serious. But the Epistolary Introduc- 
 tions in " Marmion " reveal, in charming fashion, 
 the Scott who hated Napoleon and all his works, 
 the conscious defender of romanticism against the 
 older c classical ' taste, the lover of country sports 
 and ancient manners and old recollections and 
 everyday life — the tenant of Ashiestiel, and Sheriff 
 of Selkirk. Some day he would speak out more 
 clearly. 
 
 The beginning and end of the nineteenth 
 
THE MAKING OF A NOVELIST 27 
 
 century have each known a great master of Scottish 
 letters. It is interesting to reflect that when 
 Stevenson was laid in his grave, under the wide 
 and starry sky, his work completed, he was only 
 in his forty-fifth year, while within two years of 
 that age Scott had still his chief work to do. In 
 1 8 14 Scott's life must have appeared, both to his 
 friends and to the general public, to have settled 
 down in the channel in which it was henceforth 
 to flow. He would remain Sheriff of Selkirk and 
 Clerk of Session ; he would increase his posses- 
 sions as a landed proprietor ; he would probably 
 continue to write charming poetry and to edit, 
 with ability and labour, the works of former 
 authors. The general drift of his life seemed 
 evident to all. But deep down there were two 
 secret currents affecting the main stream. One 
 was hidden from his friends and the public ; the 
 other he scarcely suspected himself. Already the 
 secret Ballantyne connection had almost ruined 
 Scott, and the hope of opening up a new vein 
 of gold in the money market may have been one 
 of the influences which turned him to novel- 
 writing. But the destiny we call chance was the 
 chief influence. Had he never found the lost 
 chapters in the old cabinet, had his friends' 
 criticism been again unfavourable, the Waverley 
 Novels might never have seen the light. There 
 
28 WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 is a mystery which veils the springs of original 
 composition, and the tides which bear great 
 writers to fame and fortune have often strange 
 turns. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE ROMANCE FROM WALPOLE 
 TO "WAVERLEY" 
 
 " Scarce I praise their venturous part 
 Who tamper with such dangerous art." 
 
 Scott. 
 
 Probably there are very few habitual novel- 
 readers who ever reflect upon the favourite 
 reading of their ancestors. Only the professed 
 student of literature is acquainted with the tales 
 which charmed the novel-readers of Shakespeare's 
 time, or with the many-volumed romances which 
 wiled away the seemingly interminable leisure of 
 the ladies of the seventeenth century. Indeed, 
 reflection on even the later history of the novel 
 makes us conscious of wide gaps in our knowledge. 
 Theo and Hetty Lambert sighed and wept over 
 Clarissa, while the Colonel chuckled at the adven- 
 tures of Tom Jones ; our grandfathers and 
 grandmothers wandered with Edward Waverley 
 or listened to the sermons of the Reverend Mr. 
 
30 WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 Collins. But who knows what came between, 
 what the Edinburgh ladies of Scott's youth and 
 manhood used to read? 
 
 In the preface to " The Lord of Ennerdale " 
 fragment, appended to the General Introduction, 
 Scott himself describes the favourite reading of a 
 lady at the close of the 1 8th century. "Lady 
 Ratcliff and her fair daughters had climbed every 
 pass, viewed every pine-shrouded ruin, heard 
 every groan, and lifted every trap-door, in com- 
 pany with the noted heroine of Udolpho. . . . 
 They had valorously mounted en croupe behind 
 the ghostly horseman of Prague, through all his 
 seven translators, and followed the footsteps of 
 Moore through the forests of Bohemia. More- 
 over, it was even hinted (but this was a greater 
 mystery than all the rest) that a certain performance 
 called the i Monk, 5 in three neat volumes, had been 
 seen, by a prying eye, in the right-hand drawer 
 of the Indian cabinet of Lady RatclifPs dressing- 
 room." A critical account of such of this 
 literature as is fiction and English, and of similar 
 contemporary or antecedent fiction, has an interest 
 not of curiosity or sentiment alone. For the 
 revival of romance is seen not only in the poets, 
 but also in the novelists of the declining years 
 of the 1 8 th century literature. The Waverley 
 Novels, too, had forerunners. Impulses long 
 
WALPOLE TO "WAVERLEY" 31 
 
 seeking freedom found there free play ; methods 
 formerly tried in tentative fashion were there 
 applied with consummate art. It is the excellence 
 of Scott which obscures his immediate prede- 
 cessors. What man but the professed student of 
 literature who can read Shakespeare or Fletcher, 
 now reads Green or Peele ? There are considera- 
 tions which make somewhat similar the relation 
 of Scott to Walpole and Clara Reeve and Mrs. 
 Radcliffe and Godwin and Jane Porter. 
 
 There are novelists and groups of novelists in 
 this transition period with whom we have no 
 concern. Some continued to work on lines which 
 Scott never followed ; others employed the novel 
 for purposes alien to his. He could not chatter 
 in the drawing-room with Miss Burney, nor share, 
 at Miss Austen's tea-table, the wittiest small-talk 
 in the world. Once he ventured into the region 
 of tea-cup and card-table, but, like his own Frank 
 Tyrell, he preferred the Cleikum Inn to the new 
 ' hottle,' and the rough wit of Meg Dods to the 
 genteel foolishness of Lady Penelope. To use 
 his own phrase, he could only do " the big Bow- 
 Wow strain." Nor were his novels novels with 
 a purpose, like those of Bage and Holcroft and 
 Godwin. It never crossed his mind to make his 
 art a means of conveying political instruction. 
 Had such a suggestion been offered, he would 
 
32 WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 probably have replied that the means was 
 unworthy. Of course, now and then his political 
 spleen betrayed itself, as when in " Ivanhoe " he 
 classed a Radical meeting with bull-fights and 
 tournaments, and unconsciously his novels por- 
 trayed his ideal society. But he was never a 
 political novelist. The burden of Carlyle's 
 unseemly denunciation of Scott — unseemly, for 
 there a great Scotsman is unjust to a great Scots- 
 man — is that he had no gospel, no message. 
 Presumably he would have had Scott imitate the 
 methods of Bage and Holcroft. It is well that 
 the author, so subject to the influence of friends, 
 had near him no critic with Carlyle's idea of a 
 novel. Otherwise we might have had to seek a 
 political reference in the oaths of Dirk Hatteraick, 
 or to evolve a metaphysical doctrine out of 
 " Wandering Willie's Tale." 
 
 What concerns our present purpose is to note 
 that from 1765 to 18 14 prose fiction was being 
 produced which bears a certain resemblance to the 
 later work of Scott. In his " Miscellaneous 
 Works " Scott defines a romance as " a fictitious 1 , 
 narrative in prose or verse, the interest of which 
 turns upon marvellous and uncommon incidents." 
 The writers of fiction from Horace Walpole to 
 Jane Porter would satisfy Scott's definition. They 
 told of drear enchantments in haunted castles, of 
 
WALPOLE TO « WAVERLEY » 33 
 
 wanderings and adventures in strange lands. Like 
 Scott, they laid their scene in the past, in mediaeval 
 Scotland or England, in Renaissance France or 
 Italy. Long before the days of Jedidiah Cleish- 
 botham or Lawrence Templeton, they employed 
 the unveiled mystification of Scott's prefaces. 
 Walpole's novel was a translation from the Italian. 
 Clara Reeve worked from a manuscript which at 
 times lacked a page, or was so worm-eaten that it 
 was scarcely decipherable. It is very characteristic 
 of Scott, who employed these honest impostures 
 more than any one, that he made fun of such 
 practices in the Introductory Epistle to " The 
 Monastery." 
 
 There is something paradoxical in the position 
 of these minor novelists, in the relation of their 
 personality and work to the kings who were to 
 rule the world of letters hereafter. Horace 
 Walpole, with his cynicism, good sense, honestly 
 expressed hate of the country, and lack of aspira- 
 tion, seems a typical man of the eighteenth 
 century. But one night he dreams a dream, and 
 when he sets down upon paper the dream and 
 all that it suggests to him, he scares — mirabile 
 dictu — the Cambridge Fellows from bed o' nights, 
 and begins in English fiction a new kind of tale — 
 the Tale of Terror. It is strange to think of 
 that periwigged figure in the grey dawn of a new 
 
34 WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 age first setting his lips to the horn at whose 
 sound fly open the gates of the Castle of Romance ; 
 strange, too, that the first suggestion of the tale 
 should come to him in a dream. One day a 
 greater magician will blow the horn and find in 
 the castle a richer treasure, while in dreams a finer 
 romantic spirit will visit fairer regions and feed 
 on honey-dew and the milk of Paradise. Nor 
 do the life and work of Mrs. RadclifFe afford a 
 less piquant contrast. Biography represents her 
 as a domesticated little lady, who was very fond 
 of her husband and was an excellent cook. And 
 yet, apart from the terrifying of her contempor- 
 aries, in landscape she is an artificial Wordsworth, 
 and in depicting villainy a milk-and-water Byron. 
 Walpole, Clara Reeve, Mrs. RadclifFe, Godwin 
 (because he wrote " St. Leon ") are sufficiently 
 allied in external purpose to be criticised together. 
 All wrote novels dealing with strange and super- 
 natural incidents, which were feigned to have 
 occurred at more or less definite historical periods. 
 He who looks forward to " Waverley " at once 
 turns to their treatment of history. Walpole is 
 not very sure when the events of his romance 
 took place ; he thinks it must have been between 
 1095 and 1243! The other writers pride them- 
 selves on their superior historical knowledge. 
 Clara Reeve lays her c gothic story ' in the days 
 
WALPOLE TO « WAVERLEY » 35 
 
 of Henry VI.'s minority; "The Mysteries of 
 Udolpho" opens in the year 1584, and the six- 
 teenth century witnessed also the adventures of 
 the Count of St. Leon. But Walpole showed his 
 wisdom in professing ignorance. If a novelist 
 selects a particular period, he is expected to adhere, 
 in some degree, to the spirit, manners, history 
 and geography of the time. These writers lacked 
 the knowledge and imagination which the his- 
 torical novel demands. Walpole has some sense 
 of what is required ; his women are modern, but 
 the manners are meant to be ancient, and the 
 atmosphere Italian. The atmosphere of his 
 followers, however, is frankly unhistorical. Mrs. 
 Radcliffe and Godwin give not the slightest 
 indication of the Renaissance spirit ; one would 
 think, from their novels, that the Europe of the 
 sixteenth century drew its aesthetic and moral 
 ideas from Rousseau, and its fashions from the 
 Paris of Diderot and D'Alembert. But Clara 
 Reeve, their predecessor, who set out to correct 
 the improbabilities of Horace Walpole, is the chief 
 sinner in historic sense. She is writing of England 
 in the closing stages of the Hundred Years' War, 
 when the nobles were so many wild beasts, at 
 feud with one another. But the old Baron's castle 
 is a modern house, with a drawing-room and 
 parlour, and apartments built on ; there is much 
 
3 6 WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 talk of airing of beds and mending of fires ; the 
 young gentlemen go out riding in the afternoon 
 for the benefit of their health. A c surgeon of 
 note ' attends the duel-like trial by combat. 
 When a helmet or a lance is discovered in such 
 a castle, we can but think that some of the armoury 
 in the hall has been left lying in the drawing-room ; 
 and when the doors of this eighteenth century 
 house, in which Squire Western might have lived, 
 fly open at the approach of the rightful heir — well, 
 we can but suspect draughts or bad locks. Nor, 
 after all, is any of these novels really historical. 
 At the most, there is a reference to a battle or 
 some political movement, or a shadowy figure 
 bearing a name known to history crosses the stage. 
 This is not to be considered a fault. It arises 
 from the limitation of the art of the writers. 
 History to them is but a background, very faintly 
 coloured, against which they may represent strange 
 figures and striking incidents. In history for its 
 own sake they have little interest. 
 
 These writers differ very much in their power 
 of telling a story, and in the qualities which go 
 to make a good novelist. Walpole's work has 
 much more body than that of his would-be 
 corrector, has also more suggestiveness and 
 interest. But both make very little use of 
 excellent material. We know how a poor talker 
 
WALPOLE TO "WAVERLEY" 37 
 
 spoils a good tale in the Celling, how badly the 
 plot is constructed, how vapid the persons con- 
 cerned. Much similar criticism might be applied 
 to Walpole, while it would hold good almost 
 entirely of Clara Reeve. All these novelists From 
 Walpole to Godwin have little grasp of character. 
 They are too much governed by general ideas, 
 too intent on painting certain fixed types. Mrs. 
 Radcliffe is most successful here; Clara Reeve, 
 who makes her characters the mouth-pieces of a 
 very feeble morality, and Godwin, who employs 
 them to expound revolutionary ideas on politics 
 and human life generally, are most to blame. All 
 lack real humour. If Walpole 5 s retainers raise a 
 laugh, it is only because his idea of a humorous 
 diversion is so comical. Probably, however, Mrs. 
 Radcliffe did not explain away her terrors without 
 a smile. One may criticise severely the diction 
 of these tales. Walpole can give at times an 
 antique flavour to his manner; he employs the 
 old usage of the pronouns, obsolete forms of 
 address, and a certain elevation of style. The 
 same holds true, in a less degree, of Mrs. Radcliffe. 
 But both lack ease and consistency, while Clara 
 Reeve and Godwin make no such efforts. Here 
 is a passage from " The Old English Baron 55 
 (original edition, p. 112): 
 
 "'What shall we do, cousin Jack, 5 said Wenlock, 
 
38 WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 ' to pass away the time ? It is plaguey dull, sitting 
 here' — ' dull enough,' said Markham ; * I think the 
 best thing we can do is to go to bed and sleep 
 it away.' — * Faith,' says Wenlock, c I am in no dis- 
 position to sleep. Who would have thought the 
 old man would have obliged us to spend the night 
 here ? ' ' Don't say us, I beg of you, it was all 
 your own doing,' replied Markham." 
 
 All this in the year of our Lord, 145- ! Jones 
 and Blifil and Partridge speak in this way. Nor 
 is Godwin more successful. Here is how a father 
 parts from his child to follow the constables of 
 sixteenth century Switzerland ("St. Leon," 1831 
 edition, p. 215) : 
 
 " ' They shall not take you away, papa ; that 
 they shall not. I will hold you and will not let 
 you go.' — c You are a good girl, Marguerite. 
 But I know best what is proper, and you must 
 not think to control me. The men will not do 
 me any harm, child ; they dare not. Perhaps I 
 shall be back to dinner, and mamma will then 
 tell me how good you have been.' " 
 
 One would never think that Dogberry and 
 Verges were contemporaries of these constables. 
 There is a modern tone in thought and language 
 which quite destroys historic illusion. 
 
 One remark must qualify this criticism. Now- 
 adays we criticise these earlier novelists from the 
 
WALPOLE TO « WAVERLEY » 39 
 
 stand-point of readers of " Waverley " and later 
 romances. It must be remembered that the 
 romance-writers of the later eighteenth century 
 had to devise new methods, and if they fail in 
 many ways, it is only because they wrote when 
 they did. There is more satisfaction in noting 
 the romantic element, which gives their work its 
 chief value. In " Men and Books " Stevenson 
 has some interesting remarks on the differences 
 which separate Scott, the romantic writer, from 
 Fielding, the representative of the * classical ' novel 
 of his age. In the work of the romantic writer, 
 the reader becomes c conscious of the background,' 
 has ' a sense of the subtle influences that moderate 
 and qualify a man's personality,' understands that 
 4 the nature of the landscape or the spirit of the 
 times ' counts for something in a story. If these 
 canons of criticism be applied to the novelists we 
 have been considering, it will be found that in 
 some of them the chains of the classical spirit 
 have been cast off. Clara Reeve is still in the 
 eighteenth century with Fielding. But Walpole 
 (though otherwise there is little of the romantic 
 about him) at least aspires to represent the 
 influence of the occult world on character, and, 
 in connecting his unnatural incidents with the sin 
 and remorse of Manfred, he shows some under- 
 standing of how the supernatural may best be 
 
4 o WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 used. In a way, indeed, he surpasses his followers 
 here. Mrs. Radcliffe explains away her mysteries 
 by means of mechanical devices. Godwin has 
 really no sense of supernatural fear. At Udolpho 
 the reader fears the unknown, but the unrevealed 
 compact in " St. Leon " inspires no dread. The 
 author tells us that the terms were such that it 
 could never be revealed ; one rather suspects, so 
 little is the illusion his art conveys, that he himself 
 knows nothing about it. But c the nature of the 
 landscape ' counts for much both in Godwin and 
 Mrs. Radcliffe. The Count of St. Leon is drawn 
 by Byronic sympathy to high mountains, wide 
 waters, and waste places. The landscapes of Mrs. 
 Radcliffe, so charged with emotion, so harmonious 
 with the spirit of the on-looker, have been praised 
 of all critics, even while they condemned their 
 artificiality. Indeed, the latter writer is romantic 
 to the core. She understands how the ear of a 
 reader is charmed by the sound of a lute at night 
 in solitary places, how his eye follows with wonder 
 an armed man upon the battlements in the moon- 
 light. She surpasses Scott in winning the reader's 
 sympathy for those subtle instincts and blank 
 misgivings which have such power over the spirit 
 of man, and in making so much out of a shadow, 
 a touch, a cry at night, she is the forerunner of 
 later mighty artists in romance. 
 
WALPOLE TO « WAVERLEY » 41 
 
 It is well known that the successors of Walpole 
 and Mrs. Radcliffe formed a distinct school, the 
 School of Terror. There horror was piled upon 
 horror, the natural (in the sense of the ordinary) 
 became the supernatural, ghosts gibbered in every 
 street, and reality was left so far behind that in 
 one of the most famous novels of this school, the 
 hero was created not by God but by Man. But, 
 for our present purpose, it is not worth while to 
 criticise these romances. In the first place, the 
 masterpieces of this school, " Melmoth " and 
 " Frankenstein," were produced during the publi- 
 cation of the Waverley Novels. In the second 
 place, any attraction which the Terror School had 
 for Scott, was confessedly due to its early writers, 
 to Walpole and Mrs. Radcliffe, and perhaps to 
 Lewis. It is more to the purpose to consider the 
 rise of the historical novel proper, which dealt 
 with the men and events of history. A good 
 representative of this class is Jane Porter, whose 
 characteristics are all displayed in a novel well 
 adapted for comparison with Scott — " The Scottish 
 Chiefs." 
 
 Critics have few good things to say of Jane 
 Porter. Yet, if good intention excuse bad work, 
 her faults deserve pardon. Her youth, as told 
 in the preface of 1840, presents a curious parallel 
 to Scott's own. She had early associations with 
 
42 WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 the Border country, and her girlhood was spent 
 in his own Edinburgh. Her interest in Scottish 
 history and story was due to the tales told her 
 in childhood by humble friends and servants ; she 
 was influenced even more than Scott by the 
 struggle with Napoleon, and the newly-roused 
 aspirations of the Poles directly inspired her 
 " Thaddeus of Warsaw." One is at first sight 
 surprised that critics should pass over in silence 
 a novelist who, four years before the publication 
 of " Waverley," had written a novel, praised by 
 Sir Walter himself, dealing with ancient Scottish 
 history. But the neglect is justified. Scott owes 
 nothing to her, except perhaps a warning. It is 
 not only that she hopelessly distorts the facts of 
 history, that what she calls " some liberties with 
 time and circumstances," involve the representa- 
 tion of Wallace's execution as the immediate 
 precursor of Bannockburn. Her method is quite 
 different from Scott's. Her effects are not pro- 
 duced by any real appreciation of national character 
 and sentiment. Her chiefs are patriots, but 
 not Scottish patriots.. Her country-people are 
 virtuous peasants ; but there is no Cuddie Head- 
 rigg, and of course there is no dialect. A few 
 changes in name and action, and the scene might 
 have been laid in any country under the sun. 
 Moreover, the heroes of her romance, for whom 
 
WALPOLE TO « WAVERLEY » 43 
 
 she invents love-affairs, metaphysical soliloquies, 
 sublime flirtations, whom she transports to all 
 manner of strange scenes and adventures, are men 
 who play a great part in history. The reader's 
 historic sense, his reverence for great names is 
 confused, perhaps offended. Such writing seems 
 to deserve the condemnation of the hostile critic 
 who calls historical fiction a lie, and not a noble 
 one. 
 
 Now, it is very interesting to note that, at one 
 time, Scott was much attracted to the literature 
 of the Terror School. This school owed much to 
 German romantic literature, and with the German 
 romance-writers, Scott became acquainted, through 
 the class he joined in 1792. Thus his first printed 
 poems, " Lenore " and " William and Helen " 
 were translations or imitations of the romantic 
 poetry of Germany, and his first drama, " The 
 House of Aspen," was modelled on the German 
 romantic play. About this time he seems to have 
 written much original poetry, dealing with the 
 supernatural. Some specimens are given by 
 Lockhart. One of these unpublished ballads, 
 "The Shepherd's Tale," told the story of 
 him who blew the horn before he drew the 
 sword. 
 
 But even in the region of Terror Scott already 
 felt that prose, not verse, was his proper instru- 
 
44 WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 merit, and in 1799 he began to weave the same 
 legend into a prose romance. His model, as he 
 confesses, was M The Castle of Otranto," and 
 its chief interest was to consist in the legend 
 of Canobie Dick and Thomas the Rhymer. 
 " Thomas The Rhymer," however, is a mere 
 fragment. His interest in the Terror School was 
 short-lived, and he himself tells us how the poetry 
 of Joanna Baillie soon gave him a distaste to such 
 literature. Indeed, his common-sense and funda- 
 mentally rationalistic view of life must always 
 have been revolted by the extravagance of many 
 of the Terror writers, and the very year of the 
 " Rhymer " fragment saw an attempt at prose 
 fiction in another style. " The Lord of Enner- 
 dale " sketch has nothing in common with the 
 work of Walpole and Lewis, and, indeed, though 
 quite ignored by critics, resembles the Waverley 
 series much more than its contemporary effort. 
 Here are the first hints of plans which the great 
 novelist was often to follow. The story is told 
 in a letter sent by one friend to another, has a 
 modern setting, professes to follow an old manu- 
 script in its delineation of the past. Unfortunately, 
 it is so very fragmentary that it is impossible to 
 discover its plot. But what we have is sufficient 
 to show how early Scott abandoned his first literary 
 love. " Guy Mannering " is perhaps the best 
 
WALPOLE TO "WAVERLEY" 45 
 
 proof of how alien to his mind the Terror methods 
 really were. The kernel of that novel is contained 
 in the legend told him by John M'Kinlay, his 
 father's servant, in which a youth, threatened from 
 his natal hour by a mysterious fate, is enabled, 
 through the help of an aged astrologer, to struggle 
 with the Evil One and overcome him. We may 
 imagine what a thrilling tale of horror Lewis or 
 Maturin would have made out of such material. 
 But who can find a trace of the Terror School in 
 Scott's account of the fortunes of the Bertram 
 family ? 
 
 Scott once expressed his indebtedness to the 
 novels of Cervantes. But of contemporary writers 
 of fiction there were only two to whom he really 
 owed any obligation. The extravagance and 
 untruth of the Jane Porter school of historical 
 novelists early roused the wrath of professed 
 students of history, and Mr. Strutt, with a praise- 
 worthy belief that example was better than 
 precept, tried to prove that an antiquary could 
 write a novel as well as anyone. The interest of 
 the romance of " Queen-Hoo Hall " is that, as 
 Strutt died before its completion, Scott was 
 entrusted with the task of adding the finishing 
 chapters. He did so in 1808-09. Strutt's work, 
 which was meant to be a description of English 
 manners in the reign of Henry VI., had little 
 
46 WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 merit ; its fault, as pointed out by Scott, was that 
 it appealed to the antiquary alone. Still, here 
 again was a warning to the future author of 
 " Waverley." Scott's own portion is remarkable 
 only because he here began his practice of intro- 
 ducing songs into the narrative. The mere 
 attempt at fiction, too, gave him confidence, and 
 was a stimulus to original work. But he confessed 
 
 o 
 
 that he owed much more to the work of Miss 
 Edgeworth. Her descriptions of Irish manners 
 first showed him how he might best apply his 
 unrivalled knowledge of his native land. In his 
 own words : " I felt that something might be 
 attempted for my own country, of the same kind 
 with that which Miss Edgeworth so fortunately 
 achieved for Ireland." It is easy to see how 
 Scott must have appreciated a work like " Castle 
 Rackrent," where national manners are pictured 
 with sympathy and yet with humour, where the 
 life of the peasantry is painted with absolute truth, 
 where the national dialect and turn of thought 
 and expression colour the whole work. Miss 
 Edgeworth's way of handling her material is like 
 Scott's own. She has the same habit of including 
 in a single narrative many stories illustrative of 
 national manners. Sir Kit's treatment of his wife 
 and the account of the ' honesty ' which won the 
 election, are good examples. Jason Quirk is a 
 
WALPOLE TO « WAVERLEY » 47 
 
 slight sketch of an Irish Gilbert Glossin ; Old 
 Thady, with his love for the family and attachment 
 to the bog of Allyballycarricko'shaughin, is an 
 Irish Caleb Balderstone. 
 
 We have seen that prose fiction played a part 
 in the revival of romance. But, in the years 
 immediately preceding " Waverley," prose fiction 
 of this kind had fallen into disrepute and was 
 chiefly represented by the illiterate productions 
 of the Minerva Press. The spirit of satire, too, 
 was not silent, and altogether it seemed as if 
 prose might be forced to give up the treatment 
 of romantic themes. But all the while there lay 
 in a desk at Abbotsford the first chapters of a 
 tale which was to bring about a revolution in the 
 writing of romance. Scott had written the first 
 chapters of "Waverley" in 1805, for, five years 
 before " The Lady of the Lake," it seems to have 
 been his intention to give a picture of Highland 
 manners in prose. The criticism of Erskine, 
 however, was unfavourable, and it was not till 
 1810 that Scott made any addition to the manu- 
 script. In that year Ballantyne gave the author 
 some encouragement, but, fearing that Scott's 
 poetical reputation might suffer, he was not 
 enthusiastic. Again the manuscript was laid 
 aside, and for a time it was lost. In the summer 
 of 1 8 14 the lost chapters were found, and in three 
 
4 8 WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 weeks Scott finished the novel. The publication 
 of " Waverley " on the 7th of July, 1814, revealed 
 to the prose romance the new worlds awaiting its 
 conquest. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 THE WAVERLEY NOVELS: THE NOVELIST 
 AT WORK : EXTERNALS 
 
 "On the whole, the critic's task is perhaps less to classify a type 
 of character as good or bad, as worthy of so much praise or so 
 much censure, than to mark the material out of which a man has 
 his life to make, and the kind of use and form to which he puts 
 his material." — John Morley. 
 
 Scott has once for all deprecated comparison of 
 himself with Shakespeare. In the Journal of 
 December, 1826, he writes: "The blockheads 
 talk of my being like Shakespeare — not fit to tie 
 his brogues." There is much wisdom and not 
 a little humility in the remark, and in some ways 
 such a comparison is very unwise, and yet, in 
 what one might call the * externals ' of authorship 
 — the manner, the motive, the sources — these two 
 writers are at once so like and unlike that com- 
 parison for critical purposes is not unfruitful. In 
 the case of Scott, much of the critic's work is 
 already performed for him by the novelist himself. 
 
5 o WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 He has told the history of his own compositions 
 and indicated his chief authorities. He has been 
 his own critic ; he has defended his manner of 
 composition and his employment of historical 
 material. In Shakespearian criticism perhaps the 
 most interesting problem has been the tracing of 
 the dramatist's development, the attempt to find, 
 mirrored in the plays, the changes in his attitudes 
 to the world. The criticism of Scott's novels 
 presents no such problem. When he began to 
 write novels he was a man of mature age, with a 
 mind fully formed and ideals firmly conceived. 
 There came a great crisis in his life when the 
 work of fifty-four years seemed to be shattered 
 into fragments. But, though the Introduction to 
 the Chronicles of the Canongate is somewhat 
 gloomy, there is no novel of Scott's which can 
 be said to have been written c in the depths.' 
 
 There are, however, two characteristics of 
 Scott's authorship upon which something must 
 be said. The first is the gain the author of 
 " Waverley " derived from his work ; the second 
 the anonymity in which he hid himself. Shake- 
 speare was a share-holder in the Globe Theatre 
 and the owner of New Place, Stratford. Scott 
 was a secret partner in the Ballantyne printing and 
 publishing business, and the Laird of Abbotsford. 
 This would not matter in either case were it not 
 
THE NOVELIST AT WORK 51 
 
 that, out of these facts, a complete theory has 
 been formed of the motives which impelled the 
 dramatist and the novelist to write. In Scott's 
 case this theory has been stated most fully by 
 Carlyle. According to this argument, we must 
 believe that Scott wrote his novels because he 
 wanted money to buy land. This greed of gain 
 was the cause of the speed with which he wrote, 
 of his carelessness of his immense production. 
 He found that the public would pay for novels 
 produced at the rate of so many a year, and that 
 it demanded no very high standard of artistic 
 excellence. His ambition was vulgar — the 
 acquirement of wealth and position. To this 
 vulgar ambition he prostituted his art, and the 
 humours of Dandie Dinmont, the chivalry of the 
 Black Knight, the charm of Diana Vernon, the 
 agony of Edgar Ravenswood, were so many tricks 
 to win money from an easily-amused public. 
 When the relation is of so intimate a sort, it is 
 impossible to keep quite apart the estimate of a 
 man's work and the estimate of a man's character ; 
 if this be a true view of Scott's motive for writing, 
 his work must almost necessarily fall in our 
 esteem. 
 
 Now, it is undeniable that Scott was very 
 anxious to make money ; undeniable, too, that 
 there was something not quite right in the secret 
 
52 WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 connection with the Ballantynes. The motive for 
 secrecy is, of course, obvious enough. A strict 
 line was then drawn between business life and 
 professional life, and Scott could hardly have 
 declared himself a printer and publisher without 
 some loss in social status. Early in life, too, he 
 had some reason for entering into the partnership ; 
 for his legal practice was decreasing, and he feared 
 that as he became more completely involved in 
 literary pursuits it would decrease still further. 
 But as to what most concerns us, the motive for 
 writing, it cannot be said that Scott here made 
 the ideal world the servant of the material. His 
 own answer to the charge ought surely to have 
 some weight. It is contained in the conversation 
 of Captain Clutterbuck with the Eidolon of the 
 Author, related in the Introduction to " The 
 Fortunes of Nigel," and is full of his own good 
 sense. This talk of work for filthy lucre is, he 
 maintains, very largely cant. Good pay does not 
 harm the quality of work ; " a successful author 
 is a productive labourer " and worthy of his hire. 
 And then comes surely a final answer to all who 
 maintain the c filthy lucre ' theory : " No man of 
 honour, genius, or spirit, would make the mere 
 love of gain, the chief, far less the only, purpose 
 of his labours. For myself, I am not displeased 
 to find the game a winning one ; yet while 1 
 
THE NOVELIST AT WORK 53 
 
 pleased the public, I should probably continue it 
 merely for the pleasure of playing ; for I have 
 felt as strongly as most folks that love of com- 
 position which is perhaps the strongest of all 
 instincts, driving the author to the pen, the painter 
 to the pallet, often without either the chance of 
 fame or the prospect of reward " (" The Fortunes 
 of Nigel," vol. i. p. xlix.). Indeed, this whole 
 conception of Scott's character seems to rest upon 
 a confusion of thought. People are acquainted 
 with Lockhart's pathetic picture of Scott in the 
 toils, labouring night and day to clear away the 
 burden of debt. They have applied this con- 
 ception of the author to all his life, and think 
 of him always as the painful drudge. But 
 drudgery, task-work, are the very last terms that 
 should be applied to the free and spontaneous 
 flow of composition which must have made the 
 morning hours at Abbotsford as happy as any 
 passed by man. 
 
 But it may still be maintained that Scott 
 attached too much importance to wealth and 
 position. The charge is true, though not perhaps 
 in the sense in which it is stated. There is a 
 passage in the Journal (December, 1825) in which 
 Scott says of his day-dreaming that he has not 
 found " this castle-building fatal to exertions in 
 active life." But alas! both in the figure and in 
 
54 WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 the letter this c castle-building ' was fatal. The 
 dream of his life was bound up with his ideal of 
 society, a modern feudal Scotland where old family 
 ties should be renewed and ancient historic houses 
 established in strength. His ambition, Fore- 
 shadowed in the " Lay " and possibly in " Rob 
 Roy," was to revive the traditions of his race and 
 found a family possessed of lands on Tweedside. 
 There, he would rule his tenants with kindly 
 sway ; there he would dispense the ancient Border 
 hospitality. No one can read the description of 
 Abbotsford life, given by many writers, and not 
 feel that Scott's dream was very beautiful. But 
 it lured him into dangerous ways and blinded 
 him to actual facts. His dream had its humorous 
 side. It is so like Scott (who laughs at authors' 
 tricks which he employs himself, and tells a 
 thrilling ghost story without believing it), that he 
 himself should laugh at the very practice which 
 brought him ruin. Edie Ochiltree, speaking of 
 Oldbuck's antiquarian greed for land, says : " But, 
 Lord, they tell me your honour has given Johnie 
 Howe acre for acre of the laigh crofts for this 
 heathery knowe! " Here is the humour of it. 
 For the pathos — well, one has but to visit the 
 Abbotsford of to-day. 
 
 Scott has told his readers that his anonymity 
 was of great importance for his work, and that 
 
THE NOVELIST AT WORK $S 
 
 otherwise he could not have written freely. Any 
 criticism of the novels ought therefore to consider 
 the motive which led him to conceal his author- 
 ship. The primary reason is obvious. In 
 publishing " Waverley " he was essaying a new 
 form of literature, and the ill-success of the novel 
 would have damaged his poetical reputation. But 
 why did he continue to conceal his name? As is 
 always the case with Scott, the motives are very 
 mixed, and even the explanation in the General 
 Introduction does not make matters very clear. 
 Perhaps there were three main causes. " Such 
 was my humour," he says, and undoubtedly he 
 enjoyed the joke immensely. The anonymous 
 publication of two of the longer poems ; the 
 attempt to father them upon Erskine ; the secret 
 connection with the Ballantynes — all prove that 
 he took great delight in a mystery of this sort. 
 Again, the concealment of his name protected him 
 from what he liked least in the calling of a man 
 of letters — the flattery of friends, the irritation 
 of personal criticism, the self-consciousness of 
 authorship. Finally, it was part of the pride 
 which was at once Scott's strength and weakness 
 that he was rather ashamed of the role of the 
 mere man of letters. In a letter to Crabbe written 
 some time in 1 8 12, he talks of the duty of playing 
 " a more respectable part in society than the mere 
 
56 WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 poet." The anonymity enabled the Laird of 
 Abbotsford to play what he thought to be a more 
 respectable part. 
 
 For literature this secrecy had at least one 
 important result. Critics do not notice that to 
 this source may be traced almost all the delightful 
 settings and epistles prefixed to many of the 
 novels. In themselves these introductions have 
 much merit ; the scenes at the Wallace Arms, the 
 discovery of Old Mortality by Peter Pattieson, 
 the Dick Tinto incident, the humorous implica- 
 tion in the narrative of the characters of Jedidiah 
 Cleishbotham and Captain Clutterbuck, the per- 
 sonal touches in Chrystal Croftangry, deserve far 
 more attention than readers generally give. But 
 apart from their intrinsic worth, these introductory 
 epistles had two main purposes. In the first 
 place, Scott employed them to conceal himself 
 from public view and to combat criticism which 
 threatened to disclose his secret. Sometimes he 
 hoped that he might really deceive the public ; 
 again he merely hoped to mystify his readers or 
 increase their curiosity. Thus the first " Tales of 
 my Landlord," issued by a new publisher and 
 in a new form, were a deliberate attempt to 
 persuade the reading public that a new author 
 had appeared, and the prefatory letter to 
 " Ivanhoe " had originally a similar intention. 
 
THE NOVELIST AT WORK 57 
 
 Elsewhere he combated the arguments of Mr. 
 Adolphus's clever hook, or exposed imitators, or 
 endeavoured to convince his readers that only a 
 joint-stock company could produce so many tales 
 at once. He had, too, a second purpose in these 
 prefaces. His anonymity prevented personal 
 defence of his views of fiction and history, or 
 personal reply to criticism. Once, it is true, he 
 wrote a review of his own works, but he regretted 
 this breach of literary etiquette, and found that 
 in these introductions he could express himself 
 far more freely. Hence it was here that he 
 defended against Clutterbuck his way of writing, 
 and against Dryasdust his handling of history ; 
 here that he made his apology for mistake in fact 
 or treatment ; here too, that, worn with work, 
 he attributed, with his usual mingling of humour 
 and pathos, the imperfections of his two last tales 
 to the death of Peter Pattieson. He employed 
 this means also to give a sort of fictitious authority 
 to his tales, and thus explained his motives 
 for breaking new ground in " Ivanhoe " and 
 " Quentin Durward " ; finally, the fathering of 
 his novels upon imaginary persons was but another 
 aspect of his aloofness from his art and his 
 apologetic attitude towards it. 
 
 It would be a great thing if criticism could 
 show how the entire work of an author grew, 
 
5 8 WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 could show the living organism developing from 
 small beginnings until it became the splendid 
 whole we know, complicated in structure and 
 manifold in function. Yet this is a task beyond 
 our powers. It is impossible to depict any orderly 
 development in Scott's mind of the great structure 
 we call the Waverley Novels. Professor Herford 
 (" The Age of Wordsworth "), in some acute 
 criticism of Scott, states that the history of their 
 development is that of the gradual extension of 
 a fixed method to wider fields, and divides the 
 novels into three groups: (i) 1814 to 181 9, 
 treatment of seventeenth and eighteenth century 
 Scotland: (2) 1819 to 1823, treatment of the 
 English Middle Ages: (3) 1823 to 1831, treat- 
 ment of Continental history. But Professor 
 Herford himself shows that the groups overlap. 
 No sooner had " Ivanhoe " been written than the 
 author came back to Scottish history, while the 
 novels immediately succeeding " Quentin Dur- 
 ward " dealt with Scotland, contemporary and past. 
 On the whole, however, this triple division is 
 the best that can be made, for 18 19 and 1823 
 mark real extensions of method. An earlier 
 extension is noted by Lockhart. In " Waverley " 
 his sources were chiefly tales told him in boyhood, 
 particularly those of Invernahyle ; in " Guy 
 Mannering " he sketched the Scotland of his 
 
THE NOVELIST AT WORK 59 
 
 early youth ; in " The Antiquary " the Scotland 
 of his early manhood. But in « Old Mortality," 
 published in 181 6, he made his first attempt to 
 reconstruct the past from written records. Hence 
 Professor Herford's first group ought perhaps to 
 be subdivided. But Scott's work is the last place 
 where orderly development should be looked for. 
 One never knows whence his mind will catch 
 inspiration. His creative power finds recreation 
 in contrast. From the almost pure imagining of 
 " The Pirate " he turns to reconstruct, from 
 countless documents and plays, the London of 
 James VI. He pictures the state-craft of France 
 and Burgundy, but turns, with a sigh of relief, 
 to draw the humours of everyday life in a health 
 resort, and to see, beneath the common-place 
 surface, the play of terrible passions. Not until 
 the last illness is there real deterioration in the 
 long series. There is much admirable work in 
 "The Fair Maid" and "Anne of Geierstein." 
 It is true that, as time went on, his material 
 threatened to become exhausted. Scenes and 
 characters employed before are used in later 
 novels; Flora M'lvor is the first of a series of 
 high-strung heroines, Davie Gellatly, too, has 
 many successors, and parts of " Rob Roy," as 
 will be noticed later, curiously anticipate scenes 
 in " Redgauntlet." Yet, as a rule, new setting 
 
60 WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 is made to give variety and freshness to old 
 material, and if Scott sins in repeating himself, 
 he is in good company, for he sins with Shake- 
 speare. It seems impossible to maintain, with 
 some critics, that Scott's work suffered permanent 
 injury from the malady which afflicted him from 
 1817 till the beginning of 18 19. During that 
 illness " Rob Roy," " The Heart of Midlothian," 
 " The Bride " and " The Legend " were written 
 and published, while the years which followed the 
 re-establishment of health saw Scott apply his 
 genius to the fictitious treatment of English and 
 foreign history. His name will always be associ- 
 ated with the pure romance of chivalry. But 
 " Ivanhoe " was not published until after the 
 illness. 
 
 A melancholy interest attached itself to his last 
 published novel. From Smailholm, where, for 
 literary purposes, it all began, to Dryburgh, where 
 it all ended, is but a few miles' walk. And so, 
 as in youth it was by the Border ballads and tales 
 he had first gained firm footing in the world of 
 letters, now, in his last days, he wrote once 
 more of Border castles and Border life and 
 the ripple of south-country streams over the 
 pebbles. The beginning and end of his life 
 were one. 
 
 Anyone who traces the sources of Scott's novels 
 
THE NOVELIST AT WORK 61 
 
 must be amazed at the receptivity of his mind. 
 " Ivanhoe " is a good example of his general 
 method; old histories and chronicles give him 
 his idea of the time and its manners ; from ballad 
 and legend and romance he drew the character 
 of Richard I., and many of the Robin Hood 
 incidents. The name of the hero came from an 
 old rhyme on Hampden's ancestors, and that of 
 Front De Bceuf from a chronicle. Mr. Skene 
 suggested to him his treatment of the Jews. The 
 substance of a conversation with William Clerk 
 was embodied in the philological discussion of 
 Gurth and Wamba. Athelstane's resuscitation 
 was due to James Ballantyne, and the particulars 
 of the Templar's death were copied from those 
 attending the sudden decease of a Mr. Elphinstone 
 at Edinburgh. Here the sources are of three 
 kinds : reading, the suggestion of friends, actual 
 experience. This last general source has a sub- 
 division — autobiography. 
 
 Some remark is necessary upon each of these 
 sources. As a rule Scott did not select a period 
 and then read up specially about it. He verified 
 former knowledge, increased his acquaintance with 
 details, tried and tested views he had already 
 formed. For the rest, he depended upon his 
 memory. In the Journal (Oct. 1826) he com- 
 pares himself with his imitators in historical 
 
62 WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 fiction : " One advantage I have over all of them ; 
 they may do their fooling with better grace, but 
 I do it more natural. They have to read old 
 books to get their knowledge, I write because I 
 have long since read such works and possess the 
 information they seek for." " Woodstock " is a 
 curious illustration of these remarks. The tricks 
 played by the Loyalists on the Roundhead com- 
 missioners are related in a series of contemporary 
 pamphlets which Scott had once read. When he 
 wrote the novel he remembered the incidents, but 
 where he had read of them he quite forgot. Thus 
 much of the novel was entirely founded on the 
 unverified recollection of former reading. His 
 employment of history will be treated in a future 
 chapter ; to understand his method it is sufficient 
 to note here that from the mere hints of history 
 he constructed the characters of Henry Gow and 
 Conacher. The novel most informed by his read- 
 ing is perhaps " The Fortunes of Nigel." The 
 original design of the book was a series of private 
 letters illustrative of manners in the time of 
 James I. ; but on his friends representing that 
 he was wasting good material for a novel, he 
 abandoned the plan and turned the antiquarian 
 letters into a work of fiction. The origin of the 
 book probably accounts for its richness in historical 
 detail. But the knowledge displayed was the 
 
THE NOVELIST AT WORK 63 
 
 result of the reading of a life-time. Jacobean 
 plays, poems, pamphlets, tracts, memoirs, histories, 
 letters, had been thoroughly digested by this 
 omnivorous reader of mighty memory, and con- 
 tributed turns of speech, incidents, characters, and 
 descriptions of costume and manners to the 
 novelist's living picture of Old London. Other 
 men have possessed similar knowledge ; it is 
 sometimes possessed by the antiquarian or literary 
 specialist ; but Scott's great merit was that he 
 united this knowledge with the genius of a 
 creative artist, and that, out of the trivial detail 
 of a hundred plays and pamphlets, he fashioned 
 the rich stuff and material of a splendid historical 
 romance. 
 
 Scott owed a great deal to his friends. Erskine 
 and James Ballantyne were, of course, his regular 
 critics ; but in the way of actual suggestion there 
 were two men to whom his obligations were so 
 great that their names deserve to be remembered 
 as long as his work is read. Mr. Skene's 
 important contribution to " Ivanhoe " has already 
 been noticed ; he also suggested the introduction 
 into " Anne of Geierstein " of the Vehmgericht 
 and of King Rene. Skene, too, travelled much 
 on the Continent, and his journals and sketches 
 were of great service to Scott in writing romances 
 of foreign history. But Scott's ablest helper was 
 
64 WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 Mr. Joseph Train. He had originally literary 
 ambitions for himself, but no sooner had he 
 become acquainted with Scott than he abandoned 
 all idea of independent composition and set 
 himself to supply the novelist with material for 
 his fictions. One would like to know more about 
 him. It is not every man who can recognise his 
 own limitations and set himself to serve a greater. 
 But if there were originally self-sacrifice, it must 
 have been repaid by the consequences. Train 
 recalled to Scott the astrologer story which forms 
 the basis of " Guy Mannering," and supplied him 
 with details of Galloway gypsy life. From his 
 information he derived the machinery of the 
 " Tales of my Landlord." It was Train who 
 suggested that Claverhouse would be a suitable 
 hero for romance and that the narrative would 
 come well from Old Mortality ; it was he, too, 
 who, by collecting information on the Western 
 Covenanters, encouraged Scott to carry out this 
 idea. Probably Train's present of Rob Roy's 
 purse first turned Scott's attention to the romantic 
 possibilities of his country's Robin Hood. 
 Finally, the plot of " The Surgeon's Daughter " 
 was related by the same indefatigable friend. 
 Never was service, so generously given, employed 
 to such noble purpose. 
 
 To mention even a part of the novelist's debt 
 
THE NOVELIST AT WORK 6s 
 
 to experience would fill pages. Some account of 
 such sources has been already given in the first 
 chapter. The friends of his early boyhood seem 
 to have impressed his imagination with particular 
 clearness, and George Constable, Mr. Whale, and 
 Invernahyle all sat for portraits in the novels. 
 Nor did actual experience supply him only with 
 character, plot, and landscape. Incident, name, 
 saying, were stored up in the writer's mind and 
 embodied naturally in his compositions. Thus 
 the famous ( praetorian ' incident in " The Anti- 
 quary " actually happened to the father of his 
 friend, William Clerk ; Dalgetty and Meg Dods, 
 to select two of many instances, were names of 
 persons met in his youth ; * what for no ? ' was 
 the favourite expression of Willie Laidlaw. Mr. 
 Skene relates how Scott included in his work a 
 conversation he once had with a ship-wrecked 
 sailor, and in " The Fortunes of Nigel " (vol. ii. 
 p. 1 68) the author himself tells us that he made 
 a practice of extracting information from everyone 
 he met, though his fellow-traveller might be " the 
 stupidest of all possible companions ... or the 
 most arrant cumber-corner." 
 
 It is interesting to note autobiographic elements 
 in the novels. He seems to have embodied 
 portions of his nature in Colonel Mannering and 
 Jonathan Oldbuck. In the former he sketches his 
 
66 WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 man of the world side, but very slightly and with 
 little earnest intention. In the latter he satirises 
 his own antiquarian pursuits, and there is perhaps 
 a touch of tender reminiscence in the Antiquary's 
 love-story. Chrystal Croftangry, of course, has 
 much of himself, and in the story of the dweller 
 in the Cannongate are sketches of his father, his 
 family, and his friends. The personal interest of 
 " Redgauntlet " has often drawn attention ; we 
 have already seen that Alan Fairford does not 
 completely represent the young Scott. But what 
 has been persistently overlooked is the personal 
 interest of " Rob Roy " and its strange relation 
 to " Redgauntlet." Scott identifies himself with 
 Frank Osbaldistone more completely than with 
 any of his heroes. We saw, in the first chapter, 
 that the account of Frank's education, his love 
 of poetry and romance, his hate of the drudgery 
 of business, were derived from Scott's own youth. 
 But Frank's further history has no less personal 
 interest. His political attitude is Scott's own ; 
 Jacobitism offends his judgment but appeals to 
 his sentiment. He is no singer, but is said to 
 have sung a song while drunk ; the same incident 
 happened to Scott. The Osbaldistones, like the 
 Scotts, are a long-descended family of country 
 gentlemen, and Frank's father, like Scott's, has 
 been the first to engage in business. May there 
 
THE NOVELIST AT WORK 67 
 
 not be a piint of the ambition of the author's life 
 in Frank*s escape from the trammels of affairs to 
 occupy the coveted position of a landed pro- 
 prietor? Finally, all critics admit the personal 
 element in " Redgauntlet." But parts of " Rob 
 Roy " curiously foreshadow that novel. In both 
 tales many of the chief adventures take place in 
 the north of England ; the scene at Justice 
 Inglewood's is very like the later scene at Squire 
 Foxley's. The fortunes of the heroes of both 
 romances are involved in the preparations for a 
 Jacobite rising. It is very characteristic of the 
 descendant of Beardie to connect his own fictitious 
 personality with the fortunes of the House of 
 Stuart. 
 
 How spontaneously all this vast knowledge of 
 men and books flowed from him is seen in the 
 rapidity with which he worked. It would be idle 
 to describe once more the happy morning hours 
 of composition ; Lockhart and every successive 
 biographer have made them familiar to readers. 
 Such rapid writing, the affectation that com- 
 position was a sort of amusement in leisure time, 
 seems to have been the fashion in literary 
 Edinburgh. The Blackwood group, particularly 
 Wilson and Lockhart, carried this fashion to the 
 extreme a few years later than " Waverley," when 
 the wonder of Edinburgh society was how Wilson 
 
68 WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 found time to write (Mrs. Oliphant : "Annals 
 of a Publishing House," vol. i.). Carlyle was 
 indignant at the practice, declared that " no great 
 thing was ever done with ease, 55 and urged that 
 Shakespeare was an exception to this rule only 
 because he " first thought intensely. 55 But Scott, 
 too, first thought intensely. It would be a great 
 mistake to imagine that the few hours spent in 
 the study (I refer, of course, to the years before 
 1825) were the only hours devoted to composition. 
 Scott has told us how his work was an abiding 
 presence with him, occupying his thoughts as he 
 lay awake at nights or dressed in the morning, 
 as he cut trees in the plantations or walked with 
 friends. Indeed, one has but to remember his 
 description of his life as " a waking dream 55 to 
 understand how often in the course of his full 
 busy day, his thoughts must have been far from 
 Edinburgh or Abbotsford. 
 
 The delightful Introduction to "Nigel 55 
 describes his method of work. The truth is 
 that he had no method. He made efforts to 
 sketch out a book beforehand. But he could 
 never follow a plan. He surrendered himself to 
 his story and let it carry him whithersoever it 
 would. Now a character like Dugald Dalgetty 
 charmed his own creator, and in depicting his 
 humours the main story was forgotten. Or an 
 
THE NOVELIST AT WORK 69 
 
 incident or a curious custom won the writer's 
 attention, and he turned aside into a by-way. 
 This method or lack of method led to serious 
 faults. There is a lack of proportion in the 
 novels. For example, few pages in " The Black 
 Dwarf " are so well written as those describing 
 the Eliot household. They contain one of Scott's 
 very best descriptions of old Scots country life. 
 But the author wishes the reader to give his 
 attention mainly to the love-affair of EarnsclifF 
 and Isabel Vere and the political intrigue with 
 which it is bound up. The fortunes of the Eliots 
 are meant to be subsidiary. Here Scott's common 
 fault comes in. He is so attracted by his own 
 creation of the Eliots that he gives them a 
 prominence which the main action does not 
 warrant. On the other hand, his way of com- 
 position had great advantages. The author who 
 follows a set plan may achieve great constructive 
 triumphs ; but his story is apt to move mechanic- 
 ally and his characters to become at times mere 
 parts of the machine. An author like Scott who 
 surrenders himself to his characters is certain to 
 create men and women who have real living 
 interest. Scott, too, could have worked in no 
 other fashion. Let him surrender himself to 
 the flow of his fancy and the story would move 
 rapidly, the characters be full of life and vigour. 
 
70 WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 Restraint and a settled purpose dried up the 
 creative springs within him 
 
 Scott's plots are generally admitted to be weak. 
 Yet it cannot be said that rapidity of work affords 
 any criterion here. Carlyle had an idea that 
 " Waverley " was written slowly, and therefore 
 praised its construction. Curiously enough, 
 Stevenson, too, thought that " Waverley " was 
 written more carefully than the others (" Letters," 
 vol. i. p. 315). But, in fact, the last two volumes 
 were written in three weeks, and it is the one 
 novel which Scott himself selects as his very worst 
 example of careless construction! The first part 
 of the book does, however, give an impression 
 that the writer is taking pains ; he is feeling his 
 way, is anxious that the reader should understand 
 what he is aiming at. Perhaps this was what 
 Stevenson meant. " Guy Mannering " was 
 Scott's greatest feat in rapid writing, and was 
 the result of c six weeks at Christmas.' Yet it 
 may be questioned if Scott showed anywhere 
 greater constructive skill. The novel unfolds 
 itself like an Elizabethan drama. There is a 
 prologue in two acts. The first, which occupies 
 ten chapters, finds its unity in the person of Guy 
 Mannering. It is he who makes the prediction 
 of young Bertram's fate, who sees in the ruined 
 castle Meg Merrilies tracing in the threads of the 
 
THE NOVELIST AT WORK 71 
 
 spindle the boy's destiny, and hears her mystic 
 song interrupted by the hoarse cry of Dirk 
 Hatteraick. Thus are momentarily grouped 
 together the actors who are to play the great 
 part in the coming drama. The second act of 
 the prologue tells of the murder of Kennedy, 
 the abduction of young Bertram, and the birth 
 of Lucy amid such terrible circumstances. Then 
 the curtain rises on the first act of the drama 
 proper, and discovers the arrival of Mannering 
 at the Kippletringan Arms just when the fortunes 
 of the Bertram family have once more come to a 
 crisis. There is further skill shown in what might 
 be called the second scene of the first act, in which 
 Meg Merrilies first crosses the path of young 
 Bertram, and chance turns both in the direction 
 of Ellangowan. Is there any Elizabethan play 
 which has greater dramatic unity? The plot of 
 the latter part of the novel is much inferior, but 
 in the first volume, at least, of his Christmas 
 amusement Scott has achieved a triumph in 
 construction. 
 
 But for the lame and impotent conclusion one 
 would also have to praise the plot of " The Heart 
 of Midlothian." Here Scott set himself a difficult 
 task. The story at once plunges the reader into 
 a state of things which he cannot comprehend 
 without knowledge of three previous circum- 
 
72 WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 stances — the relations of Robertson with Madge 
 Wildfire, with Effie Deans, and with the Fife 
 smugglers. To pause in the course of the story, 
 to give bald, straightforward narratives of these 
 past events, is the novelist's plain and obvious 
 method, but it is also the least artistic. On the 
 whole, Scott avoids the danger well. The past 
 is gathered from its effects on the present, from 
 the dramatic confessions of the sin-stricken actors, 
 from the wild and whirling words of the crazed 
 girl. There is something of the same dramatic 
 revelation of a sinful past in " The Antiquary," 
 "The Pirate," and "St, Ronan's Well," but 
 nowhere, except perhaps when Elspeth unfolds her 
 terrible tale, is it so well managed. As a rule, 
 however, Scott adopts a less dramatic plan and 
 begins his tale at the beginning. As time went 
 on and treatment and subjects tended to become 
 hackneyed we can see him employ devices to give 
 variety. Thus, in " The Talisman," the unity 
 most insisted upon is unity of place ; the Diamond 
 of the Desert is the scene of the three turning- 
 points of the story — the meeting of Kenneth and 
 Saladin, the disguising and sending back of the 
 Scottish knight, the trial by combat. Or again, 
 the author changes his device ; in " Redgauntlet " 
 he tries the epistolary method of Richardson ; in 
 " St. Ronan's Well " he gives each chapter a 
 
THE NOVELIST AT WORK 73 
 
 heading, such as " an Old-world Landlady," and 
 tries to group the events of the chapter round 
 the heading. It is usually said that the novel in 
 letters was a mistake; still, while the letters 
 checked his power of making a story move, they 
 were well suited for the personal confessions of 
 his youth. But each of the methods was a 
 tour-de-force, never repeated. 
 
 While, therefore, Scott shows at times consider- 
 able skill in plots, his chief merit here is the 
 general power of telling a story well. His chief 
 faults are that he lacks a sense of proportion in 
 narrative and character, and that he often winds 
 up a plot very feebly. No one, however, seems 
 to have remarked the real cause of these £ huddled- 
 up ' endings. " The Abbot " is a good example. 
 The tale moves rapidly to the exciting departure 
 of Mary into England ; a few dry pages, like a 
 note by another hand, are added to tell the after- 
 fortunes of the lovers and of the rest of the 
 dramatis persons. This feeble close is the result 
 of a cardinal fault. In the early part of the novel 
 the reader's attention is concentrated on the young 
 lovers ; in the closing chapters interest is absorbed 
 by Mary and public events. On the whole, 
 Scott is very successful in interweaving public and 
 private affairs. But he cannot always contrive 
 that the denouements or catastrophes of public 
 
74 WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 and private affairs should coincide. They do so 
 in the splendid close of " Redgauntlet." But 
 usually one interest must be sacrificed to the other, 
 and hence comes the c huddling-up.' " Rob Roy," 
 with its slaughter in two pages, Kyd-like were 
 it not comical, of Sir Hildebrand and his stalwart 
 sons, is usually quoted as the worst example of 
 this fault. But the trouble here comes from a 
 different source. Stevenson once wrote a letter 
 to Mr. Barrie condemning books which did not 
 carry out their original intention. Now, " Rob 
 Roy " seems to come under this condemnation. 
 The book makes quite a good end with the 
 recovery of the papers, the reconciliation of father 
 and son, the receipt of Die's ring and message 
 of farewell. There was no need to bring in " The 
 Fifteen " at all ; the rising had not yet begun. It 
 will be objected that this makes a complete change 
 in the fortunes of Die and Frank. But their love 
 is not meant to end well. As part of the plot of 
 a novel for publication, the love-story is allowed 
 to end happily ; but the writer's imaginative con- 
 ception of the situation seems to be opposed to 
 the conventional course of things. Scott's own 
 history, the choice of the heroine's name, the 
 atmosphere of the love-scenes — all are against a 
 happy ending. The lovely vision of Die on the 
 Aberfoyle road has a gesture of farewell. What, 
 
THE NOVELIST AT WORK 75 
 
 then, made Scott add the uninteresting ending? 
 It seems to have been that evil influence on his 
 artistic sense — respect for public taste, which, 
 while gratifying, he affected to despise. It was 
 probably with the purpose of pleasing the public 
 that he added the conventional marriage and settle- 
 ment. It is only fair to remember that Scott 
 was very ill at this time, and his critical faculties 
 may not have been as alert as usual. 
 
 Scott's style has been the despair of all who 
 love form and felicity in expression. Its faults 
 have often been summed up by indignant 
 critics — its lack of distinction, its loose shambling 
 sentences, its unequable choice of words. It is 
 positively ungrammatical at times ; the author 
 confesses in the Journal that he c never learned 
 grammar. 5 Scott never pauses to find the one 
 sufficient term ; a phrase like c the bugle of the 
 north blast ' (which may have suggested a similar 
 expression in " Weir of Hermiston ") is very 
 exceptional, and, indeed, rarely do Scott's sentences 
 linger in one's mind. But while much attention 
 has been directed to the faults of his expression, 
 its merits, which are great, have been little praised. 
 In the first place, his use of the Scots dialect is 
 admirable ; the words then, unlike much of his 
 writing, become strong, pithy, fitted to things. 
 Scott was aware of his opportunities here. In the 
 
76 WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 advertisement to " The Antiquary " he speaks of 
 1 the antique force and simplicity ' of such a 
 dialect, of its traces of scriptural eloquence, and 
 of its power of lending pathos and dignity to the 
 speech of the peasant. What a noble use Scott 
 made of such an instrument, the famous speech 
 of Jeanie Deans before Queen Caroline has made 
 known to all readers ; there is a full rich flavour, 
 too, in the dialect of " Wandering Willie's Tale." 
 Less familiar, perhaps, is the farewell of Meg 
 Merrilies to Ellangowan (" Guy Mannering," 
 vol. i. p. 79) : 
 
 " Ride your ways, Godfrey Bertram ! This day 
 have ye quenched seven smoking hearths — see if 
 the fire in your ain parlour burn the blyther for 
 that. Ye have riven the thack off seven cottar 
 houses — look if your ain roof-tree stand the faster. 
 Ye may stable your stirks in the shealings at 
 Derncleugh — see that the hare does not couch on 
 the hearth-stane at Ellangowan. Ride your ways, 
 Godfrey Bertram — what do you glower after our 
 folk for? There's thirty hearts there, that wad 
 hae wanted bread ere ye had wanted sunkets, and 
 spent their lifeblood ere ye had scratched your 
 finger. Yes — there's thirty yonder, from the auld 
 wife of an hundred to the babe that was born last 
 week, that ye have turned out o' their bits o' 
 bields, to sleep with the tod and the black-cock 
 
THE NOVELIST AT WORK 77 
 
 in the muirs! Ride your ways, Ellangowan. 
 Our bairns are hinging at our weary backs — look 
 that your braw cradle at hame be the fairer spread 
 up — not that I am wishing ill to little Harry, or 
 to the babe that's yet to be born — God forbid — 
 and make them kind to the poor, and better folk 
 than their father! and now, ride e'en your 
 ways. . . ." 
 
 One can but exclaim, as Queen Caroline does 
 elsewhere, " This is eloquence." 
 
 Scott's style has a second great merit. His 
 historical novels dealt with periods ranging from 
 the reign of Alexander Comnenus at Constanti- 
 nople to the last efforts of the Jacobites in Scotland 
 and England. How was a writer to find a style 
 to suit all periods, and all sorts and conditions of 
 men ? It has been seen how writers like Clara 
 Reeve and Godwin failed here. But Scott, though 
 not uniformly correct, is wonderfully successful. 
 Strutt's experiment had taught him that a lavish 
 employment of archaisms closed his pages to all 
 but the antiquarian. On the other hand, a familiar 
 style like Godwin's in " St. Leon " was fatal to 
 all historic illusion. Scott steered a middle 
 course. Realism, in the case of a mediaeval 
 romance like " Ivanhoe," was impossible. He 
 therefore adopted a certain convention in style. 
 The language of his chivalrous romances may, 
 
78 WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 perhaps, best be compared with the prose of the 
 Elizabethan dramatists. It is capable of being 
 used by prince and knight, by serf and jester. It 
 aids the historic imagination ; for, although always 
 easy to understand, it is not modern, and gains 
 dignity and remoteness by employing older turns 
 of expression, terms used only in books dealing 
 with past ages or in old plays and poems. Indeed, 
 in its use of archaic forms for dignity's sake, the 
 diction of the chivalrous romances is like that of 
 poetry. Such a style was possible only to a man 
 of Scott's wide reading. Just as his poetry, in 
 its use of expletives and proper names, embodied 
 many reminiscences of the ballads and metrical 
 romances, so his prose style in the historical novels 
 owed much to his reading of old books, and 
 especially of the Elizabethan dramatists. How 
 well he knew his Shakespeare is proved by the 
 Journal and the quotations in the novels ; but 
 no other proof is needed than, for example, 
 " Ivanhoe," « Woodstock," and " The Fair Maid 
 of Perth," in which whole paragraphs are 
 constructed of Shakespearian sentences. This 
 unconscious reminiscence, which is to be dis- 
 tinguished from Oldbuck's habit of quotation, is 
 even seen in parts of the tales of eighteenth 
 century Scotland, and colours some of the speeches 
 of Lilias Redgauntlet. Finally, when Scott 
 
THE NOVELIST AT WORK 79 
 
 wishes to clothe a death-scene in language of 
 dramatic pathos, he again turns for a model to 
 the Elizabethan tragedy. Here are the last 
 words of old Elspeth (" The Antiquary," vol. ii. 
 p. 258): 
 
 " Call Miss Neville — What do you mean by 
 Lady Geraldin? I said Eveline Neville — not 
 Lady Geraldin — there's no Lady Geraldin — tell 
 her that, and bid her change her wet gown, and 
 no' look sae pale. Bairn! what should she do 
 wi' a bairn? Maidens hae nane, I trow. — 
 Teresa — Teresa — my lady calls us! Bring a 
 candle, the grand staircase is as mirk as a Yule 
 midnight. We are coming, my lady! " 
 
 The dialect is Scots. But is there not here 
 an echo of the theatre of Elizabeth and James I. ? 
 
 One further remark must be made on Scott's 
 style ; it is that of the teller of tales. His friend, 
 Mr. Morritt, has left a description of his talk, 
 and his talk and his prose style seem to have been 
 very similar. His conversation was marked by 
 spontaneity, natural ease, wealth of illustration, 
 warmth and energy, skill in giving to an incident 
 a humorous or pathetic meaning. These are also 
 the characteristics of the novelist. Sir Leslie 
 Stephen (" Half Hours in a Library," vol. i.) 
 remarks that many of the best anecdotes in the 
 novels had been related in conversation a hundred 
 
80 WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 times, and that Scott had thus served a long 
 apprenticeship to the art of story-telling. At 
 times, indeed, his manner is ludicrously like that 
 of the raconteur. He explains that the hero is 
 to be left to eat a meal while something else goes 
 on, or utters an audible sigh of relief when he 
 has completed some tiresome task of recapitula- 
 tion. But the talkative style has the merit of 
 bringing the reader into contact with Scott's own 
 personality. It is scarcely a loss that Lockhart 
 was not a Boswell. Scott's talk is there, in the 
 novels, claiming the ear of every reader. 
 
 Scott then is, once and for all, the supreme type 
 of the uncritical artist. His project is to please. 
 In manner as in matter he is the very antithesis 
 of the ideal of classical art. He blames Campbell 
 for being " a great corrector, which succeeds as 
 ill in composition as in education." We have 
 seen into what faults his lack of correction led 
 him. " The worst is I never quite know when 
 I am right or wrong " is the plaintive confession 
 of the Journal, and this lack of self-criticism 
 led him to depend very much upon friends. 
 Unfortunately James Ballantyne, along with 
 Erskine, his chief adviser, was not a good critic. 
 The melancholic Presbyterian printer was strangely 
 attracted to romances of the Middle Ages, and 
 his influence tended to check Scott's production 
 
THE NOVELIST AT WORK 81 
 
 of his most characteristic work. Thus, when 
 Scott expresses a liking for his own tale of Elspat 
 M'Tavish, Ballantyne "roars for chivalry." There 
 is hardly any instance of Ballantyne's advice being 
 of service. It was he who despised as vulgar and 
 low the description of Scottish manners in 
 " The Antiquary," who raised from the dead the 
 unfortunate Athelstane, and who, by his prudery, 
 ruined the plot of " St. Ronan's Well." This 
 last interference was so violent that one wonders 
 how Scott endured that others should meddle so 
 much with his own creations. But the truth is 
 that he did not take his work seriously enough. 
 The mottoes and c old play ' fragments illustrate 
 his attitude. There are two points about these 
 which readers forget. In the first place, it should 
 be noticed in passing that the ' old play ' fragments 
 are commonly attributed to Scott. But it should 
 be remembered that he once told Clutterbuck how, 
 in a vision of the night, the spirit of Warburton's 
 cook of unhappy memory discovered to him the 
 sooty remains of the lost collection of plays! 
 Again, the mottoes, original or quoted, are often 
 serious in intent. But very often their purpose 
 is satiric. There is scarcely a novel of which 
 this does not hold good ; but the mocking mottoes 
 of " Guy Mannering " and " Kenilworth " and 
 the Hudibrastic headings of the Covenanting 
 
82 WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 chapters in " Old Mortality " are good examples. 
 Here Scott curiously adopts the attitude of a 
 possibly hostile critic, and seems to laugh at his 
 own work. His humorous detachment from his 
 own compositions is very different from the high 
 seriousness of a self-conscious artist like Milton. 
 Yet this objectivity was of great consequence. 
 What would a ' lean hot spirit ' have done when 
 subject to the distraction of a life like Scott's? 
 The duties of legal office, the endless claims of 
 hospitality, the love of field-sports, the interest 
 in politics, would have been fatal to the absorption 
 and aloofness which go to the making of a writer 
 whose work is his idol. Nor ought the modern 
 reader to complain. It is just this objectivity 
 which in a day of metaphysical fictions and novels 
 with a purpose, gives to the Waverley Novels 
 their freshness and charm. 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THE WAVERLEY NOVELS: HISTORY, 
 ROMANCE, REALITY. 
 
 "The king of the romantics." — Stevenson. 
 
 It will be remembered that about 1814 the 
 romance held no very high place in the world of 
 letters. The historical romance, in particular, 
 had been handled with indifferent success, and 
 from Walpole to Strutt and Jane Porter writers 
 of such fiction had fallen into three kinds of 
 mistakes. A novelist like Clara Reeve might lay 
 a story in a certain century, but make no attempt 
 to sketch the historical background or deal with 
 the men and events of the time. Such a romance 
 was not an historical novel proper. Or an 
 antiquarian like Strutt might make fiction a feeble 
 vehicle for instruction in the manners and customs 
 of a by-gone age. Or, finally, the great figures 
 of a stirring period might fill the pages of a 
 novelist like Jane Porter, but fact and fiction be 
 so commingled, the details of history and tradition 
 
84 WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 so violated, sense of time and place so offended, 
 that the romance should lose all claim to be con- 
 sidered c historical 5 and take its proper place as 
 purely imaginative fiction. Romance was suffer- 
 ing the sceptre of the realm of fiction and history 
 to slip from her grasp, and there seemed no force 
 sufficient to bid her awake and claim her ancient 
 crown. 
 
 But there came one who raised the bowed head 
 and nerved the sceptreless right hand and estab- 
 lished Romance upon a more high and glorious 
 throne. And he who enthroned again the Old 
 Romance was Walter Scott. 
 
 The changes which Scott effected were so import- 
 ant that the results were similar in extent to those 
 which Marlowe and his contemporaries produced 
 in the Elizabethan drama. With the instinct of 
 genius he avoided the faults of his predecessors. 
 The thin, barren imagining; of a writer of the 
 Clara Reeve stamp could never have been con- 
 genial to a rich, exuberant spirit like his. We 
 know, too, that he consciously set himself to avoid 
 the pit-fall of the antiquary. There are differences 
 of opinion upon the measure of his success, and 
 here and there are pages over which Jonathan 
 Oldbuck may have guided the pen. But as a 
 rule Dryasdust knows his place. The reader may 
 have examined the collection of some antiquarian 
 
HISTORY, ROMANCE, REALITY 85 
 
 friend of vast learning and genial humour, and 
 had the delight of finding that the owner's 
 remarks, so racy and well-informed, clothed the 
 dry relics with life and meaning. For the reader 
 who will surrender himself to his author there 
 is a similar charm in the novelist's pictures of 
 ancient costume and manner. Nor did Scott fall 
 into the mistake of the Jane Porter school. Her 
 problem was really the critical one for the historical 
 romance. How was history to wed fiction ? Her 
 solution had been the falsifying of history. But 
 Scott adopted a new method. He made certain 
 concessions to the convention of the novel. 
 There must be a hero and heroine, and a love- 
 story, and a plot. But his general rule was 
 that the characters moved by the conventional 
 machinery of the novel must not be persons in 
 the fore-front of history. They might be closely 
 connected with great men and women, and play 
 a part in famous campaigns and memorable 
 councils. But the success of the historical 
 romance depends upon such characters being 
 private persons. Scott saw, or rather the story- 
 teller's instinct taught him, that an historical novel 
 was different in kind from a history-play of the 
 Shakespeare type. All art is a convention, but the 
 novel is less of a convention than the drama. It 
 is more familiar, nearer the ground, more detailed 
 
86 WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 in trivial aspects. Hence, if the novelist subjects 
 history to the motion of his conventional 
 machinery, it is hard for him to preserve the 
 dignity and grandeur of his subject, and to main- 
 tain, at the full height of their stature, the heroes 
 of his race. There were faults in Scott's method. 
 As we saw, it made the management of the plot 
 very difficult at times. But it wedded the 
 probability of history to the probability of 
 romance. 
 
 It is possible to give a genetic account of most 
 of the great writers of the time of Wordsworth. 
 They mostly illustrate phases of the intellectual 
 movement of their time, which is perhaps best 
 called " The Revival of Imagination." Some 
 such account may be given of Scott. But it would 
 omit much of the man and of the writer. He 
 is bigger than the men who were completely 
 absorbed by the Revival and yet he is less. He 
 brought to the writing of fiction a mind which 
 united, as they were united in none of his con- 
 temporaries, a passion for romance with a genial 
 understanding of the more prosaic facts of life. 
 What may be called the revolutionary tendencies 
 in contemporary thought did not affect him. He 
 passed through no crisis of religious or political 
 belief. The spiritual and social theories of the 
 time did not move him ; he gave no spiritual 
 
HISTORY, ROMANCE, REALITY 87 
 
 interpretation of Nature, nor did he see in the 
 Scots peasant the ideal simplicity of human life. 
 No social philosophy coloured his pictures of the 
 life of the poor. Wordsworth's Cumberland 
 Beggar has a reason for his existence: 
 
 While thus he creeps 
 From door to door, the Villagers in him 
 Behold a record which together binds 
 Past deeds and offices of charity, 
 Else unremembered. 
 
 But Edie Ochiltree exists by reason of his own 
 incomparable humour, courage and independence. 
 The function in society of such a mendicant Scott 
 believed to be just that upon which Wordsworth 
 moralises, and the readiness of the bowlers to help 
 Edie when arrested shows that he was a valued 
 member of the Fairport community. But not 
 for a moment did Scott dream of inserting social 
 theories — which, indeed, he held unconsciously — 
 in a novel. It was no social philosophy, but 
 genuine kindliness and love of human nature, 
 actual knowledge and appreciation of poorer 
 Scottish society, which led Scott to paint so 
 faithfully the life of the peasant. 
 
 But, in other respects, Scott's novels were the 
 product of their age. They were romantic ; they 
 represented man and the world in the sea-less, 
 land-less light of imagination ; they found strange 
 
88 WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 affinities between man and nature ; they roused 
 the spirit of wonder, they brought on ' the ague 
 of the mind.' They were idealistic, for they 
 turned from modern life to find a fuller satisfaction 
 in a peopled past. At the same time the novels 
 were what one must call, for want of a better 
 term, realistic. The new imaginative sympathy 
 had, of course, a feeling for such aspects of life ; 
 there is a sense in which Wordsworth is a realist. 
 Scott, however, was a realist in other fashion. 
 His novels gave the plain, matter-of-fact view of 
 life quite as well as the poetic. He did not 
 always sound the clarion. He saw the romantic 
 possibilities in the life of a Highland cateran ; 
 but he condemned it, through the lips of the 
 Bailie, as nothing but stealing, and would have 
 apprenticed its young votaries to honest trades. 
 He saw, with tender pity, brave men go to the 
 scaffold for their devotion to a hopeless cause ; 
 but he told the world through Dugald Dalgetty 
 that such men were foolish, for they would have 
 been better paid on the other side. From this 
 union, this contrast, comes the peculiar atmosphere 
 of his novels, and their most pregnant criticism 
 of life. 
 
 All critics do not accept this view of the 
 novelist. There is a general impression that Scott 
 is to be considered " the king of the romantics." 
 
HISTORY, ROMANCE, REALITY 89 
 
 Yet there are those who would deny him his 
 kingdom. We saw that the art of Mrs. Radcliffe 
 was romantic, and we look upon Mrs. Radcliffe 
 as one of the fore-runners of Scott. But Pro- 
 fessor Herford ("The Age of Wordsworth") 
 maintains that, in romance, Scott's art is inferior 
 to hers, and that intellectually he is " fast-rooted 
 in the eighteenth century." He is " the last and 
 greatest of the race of realists and humorists who 
 created the English novel." 
 
 There is some truth in this criticism. Scott 
 does heir the traditions of eighteenth century 
 realism ; he possesses the humour and sense of 
 Fielding. But just as we saw that there were 
 fundamental differences which separated Mrs. 
 Radcliffe from Fielding, so, too, Scott lives in a 
 world which would be incomprehensible to the 
 great English humorist. In Stevenson's " A 
 Gossip on Romance " we are fortunate in posses- 
 sing the Confession of Faith of a great romance 
 writer, and we may employ it to test this last 
 writer of the school of Fielding. Stevenson there 
 pursues the fleeting shadow, Romance, and tries 
 to give a definition. " Romance is the poetry of 
 circumstance. . . . One thing calls for another; 
 there is a fitness in events and places." These 
 words contain the gist of the whole matter. The 
 rest of the essay simply elaborates and illustrates 
 
 M 
 
9 o WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 this susceptibility to the power of suggestion, and 
 " the poetry of circumstance " would include the 
 romantic effects both of the supernatural world 
 and of the historic past. Let us set aside for the 
 moment the novels themselves, and try to discover 
 if Scott was personally subject to such romantic 
 influences. We turn to the Journal (February, 
 1827) and we find : " From my childhood I have 
 found something fearful, or melancholy at least, 
 about a mill." All readers of " Ivanhoe " will 
 remember Coningsburgh Castle. Here is an 
 extract from a letter written in 1 8 1 1 : "I once 
 flew past it on the mail-coach, when its round- 
 towers and flying buttresses had a most romantic 
 effect in the morning dawn." Or, finally, here 
 is an extract from the Memoranda of Mr. 
 Morritt : " He (Scott) was but half-satisfied with 
 the most beautiful scenery when he could not 
 connect with it some local legend ; and when I 
 was forced sometimes to confess with the Knife- 
 grinder, c Story ! God bless you ! I have none 
 to tell, sir ' — he would laugh and say, c then let 
 us make one — nothing so easy as to make a 
 tradition.' " Can one think for a moment that 
 Fielding ever looked upon a mill with fear, or 
 that a castle-tower in the dawn moved him to 
 mysterious feelings? Fielding can make a story, 
 but he cannot c make a tradition. 5 He who makes 
 
HISTORY, ROMANCE, REALITY 91 
 
 a tradition must have intuitive knowledge of 
 place and circumstance; at the hour must come 
 the man. And for this happy skill it needs the 
 romance writer. 
 
 The romantic art of the novels can only be 
 considered along with their treatment of history. 
 There is much destructive criticism of the 
 historical romances, but it is often based upon 
 misapprehension both of Scott's purpose and of 
 his artistic genius. There are perhaps two schools 
 of such critics. Sir Leslie Stephen, for example, 
 condemns the historical novel altogether; it is 
 " pure cram or else pure fiction." He will have 
 nothing to do with " the amusing nonsense " of 
 " Ivanhoe," and thinks that Scott ought to have 
 confined his art to " the daylight of common sense 
 and common nature." Sir Leslie Stephen is 
 supported by the historians, who condemn Scott's 
 inaccuracy. Here are some examples of his 
 anachronisms. The historical basis of " Ivanhoe " 
 is quite untrustworthy ; in Richard's reign it was 
 impossible that there could be a national Saxon 
 party. In " The Talisman " Scotland and France 
 are spoken of as if they were already firm allies, 
 but the League dates only from the close of the 
 thirteenth century. " Kenilworth " is laid in 
 1575, when Shakespeare was in his eleventh year. 
 But in the novel he is present in the ante-chamber 
 
92 WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 of Lord Leicester, and is already the leading 
 dramatist of the day; Raleigh recites a passage 
 from " Midsummer-Night's Dream," and the 
 songs of Caliban and Autolycus are sung by 
 Wayland Smith. There is, moreover, little truth 
 to history in " Redgauntlet " and " Woodstock." 
 Such faults have led critics to agree with Sir Leslie 
 Stephen in condemning the historical novel. 
 Other writers like Taine criticise quite as severely 
 Scott's handling of history, but do not therefore 
 give up the cause of the historical novel. The 
 historical novel can really be written, they think, 
 if only the writer be accurate enough and picture 
 the past in its completeness. Taine's quarrel 
 with Scott is that he selects from history only 
 what suits him, that he does not concern himself 
 with the sensuality and brutality of the Middle 
 Ages or with the epicureanism of the Renaissance. 
 He holds that Scott's art is here purely artificial, 
 and amounts at most to a talent of mise en scene 
 and a passion for the picturesque. Finally, Taine 
 is forced to fall back upon the opinion of Sir Leslie 
 Stephen — that Scott is at bottom a realist and 
 humorist, who had no business to write historical 
 romances. 
 
 Neither Taine nor Sir Leslie Stephen observes, 
 however, that Scott has two ways of looking at 
 the past and two ways of treating it in fiction. 
 
HISTORY, ROMANCE, REALITY 93 
 
 In the first place, he sees its romance. There is 
 picturesqueness in place and costume ; there is the 
 inspiration of great names and great deeds ; there 
 is the charm of distance in time ; there is the free 
 play of passion, the stir of adventure, the trumpet- 
 call of war. In the second place, the past is to 
 him what Professor Herford calls " the present 
 gone by." Hence comes his political philosophy 
 and his sturdy Toryism. He is like Burke in his 
 strong sense of the conservative tendencies in 
 society. The great preacher of the crusade against 
 the Revolution might have written this sentence 
 in " Guy Mannering " : " Even an admitted 
 nuisance, of ancient standing, should not be abated 
 without some caution." Society is to Scott a vast 
 organism in which the parts are bound, each to 
 each, by mutual services of long standing, which 
 link them with the past. He praises Monkbarns' 
 carrying the head of the dead fisherman, not only 
 because it is an act of kindness, but also because 
 it is the ancient office of the landlord. Thus the 
 political philosophy of Scott and Burke is very 
 similar. Both are keenly alive to the binding 
 force of ancient institutions and the political value 
 of class distinction ; both, too, are attracted by 
 the picturesqueness of such a society, and love an 
 institution simply because it is old. But in Burke 
 the statesman predominates, in Scott the artist. 
 
94 WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 Hence the organic view of society had great effect 
 upon Scott's work. To him the past was not 
 only a wonderland or a battlefield. He saw the 
 society of the past organised in institutions which 
 were powerful even in his own day, divided into 
 classes which still retained their distinctive features, 
 living a life which was rich in common custom 
 and business and filled with a thousand interests, 
 great and small. In his picture of the past, too, 
 he could be realist and humorist. 
 
 These two ways of looking at the past led Scott 
 to attempt two distinct kinds of historical fiction. 
 Of course there is no absolute dividing-line, and 
 the characteristics of one class appear in the other. 
 " Ivanhoe " and " Old Mortality " are held in 
 high esteem by lovers of Scott. But is there not 
 a real distinction ? The past of " Ivanhoe " is 
 the romantic fighting time ; the past of " Old 
 Mortality " is " the present gone by." Stevenson 
 may again help us here. For his own tale " The 
 Black Arrow," which describes the fighting time 
 of the Wars of the Roses, he invented, from a 
 feature of the diction, the epithet of c tushery.' 
 But he never applied such an epithet to " The 
 Adventures of David Balfour." Now, "Ivanhoe" 
 is c tushery, 5 but " Old Mortality," though a more 
 ambitious work on a larger canvas, is like " David 
 Balfour " in method. Owing to the author's 
 
HISTORY, ROMANCE, REALITY 95 
 
 nationality, there is a tendency in the novels for 
 Scottish history to become always " the present 
 gone by," but the distinction is not altogether a 
 distinction of nationality. Parts of " The Fair 
 Maid of Perth," for example, are written in the 
 " Ivanhoe " style, which again, is not the manner 
 of " The Fortunes of Nigel." No general rule 
 can be laid down to cover all cases. Perhaps the 
 nearest approach to accuracy is to say that, when 
 Scott writes of the Middle Ages, he writes novels 
 of the " Ivanhoe " type ; when he writes of the 
 history of the sixteenth century and its successors, 
 his novels resemble " Old Mortality." 
 
 For criticism, the importance of this distinction 
 is that the strictures of critics like Taine and Sir 
 Leslie Stephen apply chiefly to the " Ivanhoe " 
 class, and yet, when they are applied, they lose 
 most of their force. To criticise " Ivanhoe " as 
 a false rendering of history, as only a partial 
 representation of the Middle Ages, to declare, 
 with Sir Leslie Stephen, that its characters are 
 pure inventions, is, to use the words of Scott's 
 own defence " to point a discharge of artillery 
 against a wreath of morning mist." Scott would 
 have admitted the truth of most of these criticisms. 
 Probably Taine was right in thinking that Scott 
 did not completely comprehend the Middle Ages ; 
 this imperfect sympathy lay, perhaps, at the root 
 
96 WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 of the distinction drawn above. He disliked 
 Dante, and probably did not understand mediaeval 
 religious mysticism. Only once in " The Talis- 
 man " are the Crusaders seized with religious zeal. 
 But he did know, as few of his contemporaries 
 knew, the real state of mediaeval society — the 
 brutality, the injustice, the sternness and monotony 
 of life. All this, however, was not to his purpose. 
 " What signify dates in a true story ? " he once 
 exclaimed in the Journal, and so, too, he might 
 say : " What signifies the unpleasant side of life 
 in a fighting romance ? " The effect Scott is 
 aiming at in " Ivanhoe " is like that aimed at 
 in " The Lady of the Lake." It is to be a tale 
 of love and war and adventure ; there will be 
 wicked barons and brave young knights and 
 generous outlaws, and high-spirited damsels ; 
 there will be adventures in the greenwood, and 
 shattering of lances, and much of the pomp and 
 splendour of chivalry. Such a romance is not 
 among the very highest products of creative 
 genius. It is in no way a complete picture either 
 of England in the Middle Ages or of life at any 
 time. The characters are frankly painted from 
 the outside ; for effect much reliance is placed 
 upon costume and scenery. But who would have 
 it otherwise ? It is a legitimate form of art, with 
 a certain limited purpose. Nowhere else, outside 
 
HISTORY, ROMANCE, REALITY 97 
 
 actual mediaeval romances, is there such an appeal 
 to primal healthy instincts in the reader — his 
 natural love of fighting, his reverence for fair 
 women and brave men. It is pure healthy 
 romance, free from tawdriness or nightmare or 
 sentimentality. 
 
 - But in novels like " Old Mortality " or 
 " Nigel," while Scott still does justice to the 
 romance of history, he represents fully the other 
 side of life. Covenanters like Macbriar may 
 endure torture for conscience 5 sake ; staunch Tories 
 like Major Bellenden may hold out to the last 
 for Church and King. But there are also prudent 
 men like Niel Blane of the HowfT Inn, who send 
 their meal to both parties and " keep a calm 
 sough," and sceptics like Cuddie who are willing 
 to keep the Church, pray for the King, " and 
 drink his health into the bargain, when the ale's 
 gude." In writing of history from the Renais- 
 sance onwards, Scott feels himself in touch with 
 real life, and it is in these novels that he is able 
 to make the past live and to exhibit his more 
 realistic view of history. Hence, while such 
 historical romances have the pathos of far-off 
 things, while men and women are painted with 
 the big brush, these novels are also pregnant with 
 humour, rationalism, and closeness to actual fact. 
 There Scott flings himself into his characters, and 
 
9 8 WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 into the mingled web of romance and realism he 
 once more weaves his whole nature. 
 
 The historical novel, then, as written by Scott, 
 seems to be a legitimate form of art. Professor 
 Saintsbury (" Essays in English Literature," 
 second series) has two interesting remarks upon 
 this kind of fiction. Its success depends upon the 
 existence of a distinct and critical notion of 
 history, and upon its treatment of great historical 
 personages according to the traditional view. 
 Indeed, unless there is such a critical way of look- 
 ing at the past as Professor Saintsbury thinks was 
 supplied to Scott's readers by the historians of the 
 previous century, the novel loses its peculiar effect 
 and appears to the reader only an ordinary fiction. 
 The second requirement for success is common 
 to all art. Should drama or novel offend the 
 general appreciation of an historical character, it 
 is no longer a work of imagination but an argu- 
 ment, appealing to the critical instinct. On the 
 whole, Scott is very successful in his rendering of 
 history. He is on debateable ground in " Old 
 Mortality " ; but it is now admitted that his 
 Covenanters are much more life-like than was at 
 first supposed, and in Claverhouse he at least 
 represented the traditional view of a party. 
 Perhaps his greatest triumph in such portraiture 
 is the Queen Mary of "The Abbot." The 
 
HISTORY, ROMANCE, REALITY 99 
 
 reader's first idea of the Queen is drawn from 
 Woodcock's picture of her as a young princess out 
 hawking, happy as the day is long. It is a picture 
 which abides in the reader's memory even when 
 he comes to know the pale Queen, stricken with 
 many sorrows and haunted by suspected crimes. 
 She is never pronounced innocent, and in the 
 terrible mental agony which follows the recollec- 
 tion of Darnley's murder she is almost self- 
 convicted. But judgment is held in suspense, 
 and what the reader remembers when he lays down 
 the book is the Queen's beauty, her charm, her 
 sorrows, and her pathetic declaration that she is 
 only twenty-five ! This is the Mary of tradition. 
 Hence the distinctive charm of the historical novel 
 is that it seems to combine fact and fiction in a 
 way that tickles the intellectual palate. In con- 
 versation we are interested in a story if someone 
 we know is an actor in it. Historical fiction has 
 a like piquancy because it mingles men and women 
 known to tradition and history with fictitious 
 heroes and heroines and minor characters. The 
 Waverley Novels, too, excel in all the other merits 
 of the historical romance. There life is large and 
 important ; we learn what it is to be of some 
 service to the state ; we feel the fascination of 
 great causes and great leaders, the reviving 
 influence of the liberty of wide spaces in time 
 
ioo WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 and distance. There we breathe an ampler ether, 
 a diviner air. 
 
 It was not unimportant that the great writer 
 of historical romances was born and bred a Scots- 
 man. No country has had a more romantic 
 history. In the popular mind Andrew Fair- 
 service's c sad and sorrowfu' union,' immense as 
 was its effect upon the country's future, has little 
 importance. To the people their story is that of 
 a struggle for independence, waged against great 
 odds, and of the lost causes of a fair queen and 
 a gallant prince, consecrated by sorrow and defeat. 
 Any Scotsman with blood in his veins must have 
 written of his country's history in the spirit of 
 romance. But Scott's work was much more than 
 what, in the Introduction to the Minstrelsy, he 
 declared it to be ; " An offering to the Manes 
 of a kingdom." To quote Taine, he gave 
 Scotland once for all the right of citizenship 
 in literature. Every reader of Lockhart will 
 remember the conversation on the Mound at 
 Edinburgh, in which Scott, replying to Jeffrey's 
 light banter upon projects of reform, exclaimed, 
 not without tears : " No, no, 'tis no laughing 
 matter ; little by little, whatever your wishes may 
 be, you will destroy and undermine, until nothing 
 of what makes Scotland Scotland will remain." 
 Some of us may take exception to Scott's view 
 
HISTORY, ROMANCE, 'REALITY 101 
 
 of the Whig party. But if such destruction were 
 their purpose, he has himself foiled the enemy. 
 No, Sir Walter, what makes Scotland Scotland 
 cannot be destroyed or undermined! For the 
 Waverley Novels will be read as long as English 
 literature endures, and there the Scottish character 
 and speech and humour will preserve their 
 nationality for ever. 
 
 But it is not only in the large romantic effects 
 of history that Scott excels. Through the pages 
 of all his novels blow the fresh breezes of romance, 
 and diffuse their benefits with the fine carelessness 
 of nature. To any man of imagination a journey 
 is romantic, for it is a progress into the unknown. 
 Hence the journeys in Scott's novels — and many 
 of the novels are simply glorified journeys — are 
 always written with delight, a delight which almost 
 finds a conscious expression in Darsie Latimer's 
 love of truantry. He achieves great triumphs in 
 that poetry of circumstance and fitness of things 
 of which Stevenson wrote. Stevenson himself 
 pointed out the magic of the landing scene in 
 " Guy Mannering." But other scenes are in 
 circumstance scarcely less poetic. Quentin reading 
 in the hall of Schonwaldt the old c romant,' 
 
 How the Squire of lowe degree 
 
 Loved the King's daughter of Hongarie ; 
 
 Nigel in the lonely Alsatian house, beaten upon 
 
102 WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 by the wind-driven rain, reading by the guttering 
 candle tales of crimes soon to be perpetrated in 
 his presence ; old Elspeth singing in her death- 
 hour, of the devotion of her forebears to 
 Glenallan's Earl ; Madge Wildfire's swan song 
 of c Proud Maisie ' — these are scenes which touch 
 the heart of suggestion and hint at far-away 
 meanings in things. Sight and sound have their 
 romantic charm. Who ever forgets the beat of 
 the drums at night in " Old Mortality," or the 
 flash of the beacon in " Peveril " ! Romantic, 
 too, is the effective contrast of men and women 
 who seem to represent worlds as far apart as planet 
 from planet. The back-ground of " The Pirate " 
 is sea-girt Orcadia, peopled by kindly fisher-folk 
 or simple tacksmen. But on the high cliffs dwells 
 Noma, her brain quick with memories of the 
 Norsemen, her lips moving with their spells ; at 
 times the old world of the Vikings seems to come 
 again. With song and jest and interminable tale 
 Claud Halero transports the reader to the gay and 
 witty London of £ glorious John ' and the Restora- 
 tion. And who are these swarthy men upon the 
 sands, full of strange oaths and stranger tales of 
 the Spanish Main, uncouth in garb, rude in 
 manner, sudden in quarrel? The anomalies of 
 the situation do not merely affect the reader. It 
 is the mystery, the ' something rich and strange,' 
 
HISTORY, ROMANCE, REALITY 103 
 
 in Cleveland that attracts the imaginative Minna. 
 It is the subduing stillness of the island atmo- 
 sphere which makes Cleveland so out of love with 
 his former life. 
 
 These triumphs are achieved unconsciously, and 
 many of the most romantic scenes are carelessly 
 constructed and confused with inappropriate 
 elements. Scott does not surrender himself 
 whole-heartedly to the romantic view of life ; 
 and this critical attitude, and not only the care- 
 lessness which Stevenson censures, has a tendency 
 to mar the perfection of pure romance. The 
 humorist and realist are, at times, too strong for 
 the poet. Very characteristic is his treatment of 
 the supernatural. Scott was capable of feeling 
 supernatural fear, and has told the story of his 
 terror during a stay at Glamis Castle. But his 
 usual attitude is that of the patronising unbeliever. 
 Most men take a sort of benevolent interest in 
 the fancies of childhood. In a similar way Scott 
 is interested in belief in the supernatural as 
 characteristic of a more primitive people or of 
 earlier times. His own attitude is rationalistic. 
 Let anyone read closely Scott's studies of the 
 supernatural and he will find that, in very many 
 cases, the author unobtrusively detaches himself 
 for a moment from his narrative, and explains 
 strange occurrences in a natural fashion. Thus 
 
io 4 WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 the vision of blind Alice at the fountain — the only 
 purely supernatural occurrence in " The Bride " — 
 is apologised for as occurring in the original 
 story ; it is hinted that the apparitions in " The 
 Betrothed " are merely dreams ; and while Noma's 
 information is never fully explained, one has 
 always the suspicion that it may all be due to her 
 paid agents, and to her knowledge of the weather, 
 the country, and men and women. Scott's dis- 
 belief has its unfortunate side. Lack of sympathy 
 leads to such an unfortunate creation as the White 
 Lady of Avenel. Some of the scenes in which 
 she appears are in his very best style. When she 
 reveals to Halbert and Edward that their restless 
 thoughts are due to love of Mary and envy of 
 one another, there is the suggestion that here the 
 supernatural world represents the play of outer 
 circumstances bringing into clear consciousness 
 thoughts long dormant. But Scott's artistic care- 
 lessness combines with his disbelief to make of 
 this beautiful spirit sprung from a star-distilled 
 drop of diamond-dew, a player of practical jokes, 
 a meddler in state-affairs, a missionary in the 
 Protestant cause! 
 
 The best side of Scott's union of realism and 
 romance was that he saw the relative truth of the 
 supernatural. By imaginative sympathy he can 
 enter into the feelings of such a society as could 
 
HISTORY, ROMANCE, REALITY 105 
 
 believe in supernatural beings and powers, so that 
 there seems no improbability or rudeness in them. 
 The island-society of the Orkneys is an atmo- 
 sphere charged with weird belief. There is 
 nothing distorted, nothing unreal, in such a 
 background, and there one naturally believes in 
 Noma. Without actual intrusion of the other 
 world, too, Scott can produce, by subtle hints, the 
 impression that a man is struggling against an 
 unseen force. Ravenswood's love is doomed from 
 the beginning ; family feud, political difference, 
 poverty, his own unreasonable pride and passion, 
 the character of Lucy, are obstacles which he 
 cannot sweep away. Now Scott lets the reader 
 know that the lovers are struggling against forces 
 too strong for them, but he does so, not as an 
 historian, but as an imaginative artist. The 
 shrivelling of Edgar's severed lock in the fire as 
 he vows vengeance on the Ashton family, the 
 strange prophecy so emphatic on the lips of old 
 Caleb, the dim forebodings of blind Alice, the 
 horrid utterances of the three hags, the continual 
 reference to witchcraft — all this produces the 
 impression of a ruthless hidden power, working 
 in secret. When the storm bursts there is no 
 surprise ; we have long seen the cloud draw near. 
 Finally, Scott's greatest success in treatment of 
 the supernatural is acknowledged to be " Wander- 
 
106 WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 ing Willie's Tale." Perhaps he succeeded here 
 because he wrote of the demon world in the 
 manner of the great Scottish writers from Dunbar 
 to Burns — with bristling hair and leering eye, 
 with fearful reverence and comical contempt, with 
 ludicrous horror and familiar fear. 
 
 Scott, then, is neither a Fielding nor a Maturin. 
 If he has not Fielding's constructive skill, he has 
 his large humour and wise strength. But unlike 
 Fielding he is alive to what is beyond common 
 things and yet is suggested by them. Still he 
 never dwells in the clouds, or in the realm of 
 nightmare. Such romance becomes thin, vapid, 
 unreal. Life is a large thing in the Waverley 
 Novels because it is whole. It is well that we 
 should admire the beauty of a Highland loch. 
 But Scott thinks the Bailie's calculation of how 
 many acres of plough-lands the draining of the 
 loch would yield, also demands some consideration. 
 Life in the novels is fresh, interesting, full of 
 infinite suggestiveness, liberal, beautiful ; but it 
 is also serious, sane, comical, sad. Here is the 
 romance of realism and the realism of romance. 
 Construction is careless, conjuncture imperfect, 
 faults manifold. Yet perhaps only c a great 
 romantic, an idle child ' could have given us so 
 spacious a play-ground, in which we may wander 
 and not grow weary. 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 THE WAVERLEY NOVELS : CHARACTER, 
 HUMOUR, TRAGEDY, RELIGION. 
 
 Those plots I praise, and this man's ordered style 
 Dressed up in terms most elegant, most apt, 
 
 But, by your leave, my favourite's men and women 
 Excel their wire-pulled figures as living beings 
 Do straw-stuffed puppets ; they do move, sing, dance, 
 Call from you peals of laughter, even draw 
 A tear from the unwilling eye. Old Play. 
 
 Every reader of the Introduction to the " Tales 
 of the Crusaders " will remember that, at the 
 famous meeting of share-holders summoned to 
 form a company for the publication of " the class 
 of works called the Waverley Novels," a message 
 was received from Mr. Hermann Dousterswivel. 
 His proposal was " that some part of the labour 
 of composing these novels might be saved by the 
 use of steam." When this proposal roused some 
 opposition, especially on the part of Mr. Oldbuck, 
 the Eidolon of the author attempted to calm 
 the storm by the following statement : " This 
 
108 WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 mechanical operation can only apply to those parts 
 of the narrative which are at present composed 
 out of commonplaces, such as the love-speeches 
 of the hero, the description of the heroine's person, 
 the moral observations of all sorts, and the dis- 
 tribution of happiness at the conclusion of the 
 piece." Scott, of course, is here in his usual 
 bantering humour, and is not to be taken too 
 seriously. Still, it is not his custom to ridicule 
 what he values most highly, and he probably held 
 in little esteem the part of his work which he 
 was willing to resign to the steam-engine. Indeed 
 here, as often in his humorous introductions, he 
 is an admirable self-critic, and his summary of 
 the commonplace features of his work has fore- 
 stalled the objections of his many commentators. 
 For, first of all, his unfortunate heroes have 
 incurred almost universal censure. Insipid, 
 priggish, cold, wooden, are a few of the terms 
 which are applied to them. Many deserve the 
 censure. Perhaps the only writer who has put 
 in a word of defence is Hazlitt. He maintains 
 (" On Heroes in Novels ") that readers expect 
 too much of the hero of a novel. " Does it not 
 seem as if this character, who is to conciliate all 
 suffrages and concentrate all interests, must really 
 have nothing in him to please or give offence, 
 but is left with a few recommendations and good 
 
HUMOUR, TRAGEDY, RELIGION 109 
 
 qualities that the reader may improve upon at 
 will?" Now, this may not have been Scott's 
 theory, but it was certainly his practice. Some 
 are gallant enough young fellows ; such characters 
 are a necessary part of the artistic conception of 
 the pure romance of chivalry. Who is foolish 
 enough to quarrel with Wilfrid of Ivanhoe or 
 Quentin Durward? He who does so has not 
 entered into the spirit of the tale, which is like 
 a mediaeval romance in its bounty to the fortunate 
 youth. Other heroes are less pleasing. Nigel 
 Oliphant has suffered sorely at the hands of critics. 
 But he has more character, even if it be bad 
 character, than the others. He has some very 
 unpleasant features — sensitive conceit, fear of 
 ridicule, pride of rank. But these features, as 
 drawn by Scott, are seen to be the mere accidents 
 of self-conscious youth, marring a character really 
 worthy. It would have been easy to make such 
 a youth ridiculous ; but Scott's sympathetic picture 
 is the work of a wise, strong man. Still, as a 
 rule his heroes have to be taken on trust They 
 are not heroic. They are only more or less 
 agreeable young gentlemen, pleasantly featured 
 and sufficiently accomplished, who walk through 
 their parts in the novels with amazing unconcern. 
 They are cold because Scott often uses them as 
 mere points of view. On the great public 
 
no WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 questions which agitate the world of the novels 
 they are the commentators, the critics, the weighers 
 of sentiment and reason. To be so young they 
 are wonderfully dispassionate and, on the whole, 
 discriminating judges of politics. It is perhaps 
 because Scott was accustomed to decide otherwise 
 and to let himself be swayed by old prejudice, that 
 he is so out of sympathy with his bloodless heroes. 
 Nor have Scott's heroines won much affection 
 from his readers. Ruskin has paid a tribute to 
 their salutary influence and moral force ; but he 
 is evidently not so much attracted by Scott's 
 individual women as by his general conception 
 of womanhood as the embodiment of passive 
 strength and healing power. Here, if anywhere, 
 Scott fashions his characters " from the skin, 
 inwards." Isobel, Eveline, Rowena, Edith Plan- 
 tagent — they are all beautiful, amiable, agreeable 
 in conversation. But surely Ruskin has given 
 too high praise. Their strength is often apparent 
 only, for they are not really subjected to severe 
 trial. How different their influence from that of 
 a Helena or a Cordelia? Yet here, too, the dis- 
 tinction between the pure romance of chivalry 
 and the more realistic novel holds good to some 
 extent, for Die Vernon, Lilias Redgauntlet, and 
 Jeanie Deans are much superior to their sisters 
 in " Ivanhoe," or " Quentin Durward " or " The 
 
HUMOUR, TRAGEDY, RELIGION in 
 
 Talisman." One might then deprecate much of 
 this hostile criticism. It holds good, but, when 
 the nature of the chivalrous romance is remem- 
 bered, it does not matter. The heroine in the 
 tales of chivalry has fulfilled her purpose ; she 
 has been beautiful and interesting enough to fight 
 for, kind enough to marry the hero in the last 
 chapter. Hutton's criticism seems very accurate ; 
 it is because Scott has too chivalrous an idea of 
 woman that he fails in his heroines. But let this 
 goddess descend from her pedestal into the tangled 
 world of affairs ; let her, like Die, have something 
 of the boy in her composition and yet remain 
 ever so womanly ; let her, like Jeanie Deans, be 
 presented with a great moral problem which 
 would appeal to men and women alike ; let her, 
 like Lilias, play a part in the world of politics 
 and face the danger of rude adventure ; — then 
 woman is no more a glorified image, but a charm- 
 ing companion, a wise counsellor, a partner in 
 the business of life. It is in such situations, 
 where women may be drawn in outline, and broad 
 general features easily expressed, that male 
 novelists, unless they be men of exceptional 
 intuition, have been most successful in depicting 
 women. 
 
 A novelist with so little interest in hero and 
 heroine naturally wrote no great love-story. 
 
ii2 WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 There is passion in " The Bride of Lammer- 
 moor " ; the yielding to tenderness of a strong 
 nature like Die Vernon's is inexpressibly touching ; 
 many of the love-scenes have a pleasing enough 
 atmosphere of romance. But, as a rule, neither 
 author nor reader is interested. The tender 
 speech, the clasp of hand in hand, leave us cold 
 and unmoved. " There are perhaps such things," 
 says Bagehot, " as the love-affairs of immortal 
 beings ; no one would learn it from Scott." In 
 his novels no Romeo and Juliet utter their passion 
 to the night air, no Richard and Lucy make love 
 in the meadows as if they would never be old. 
 In "The Monastery" and "The Betrothed" 
 Scott is so careless that there is not a single scene 
 between the lovers in whom he expects the readers 
 to be interested, and their love can only be learned 
 from hints and side-remarks! Yet his ideal of 
 love was high. In " The Abbot " (vol. ii. p. 194) 
 Catherine Seyton tells Roland what love should 
 be : " Believe me, they think vilely and falsely 
 of women — I mean of those who deserve the 
 name — who deem that they love the gratification 
 of their vanity, or the mean purpose of engrossing 
 a lover's admiration and affection, better than 
 they love the virtue and honour of the man they 
 may be brought to prefer. He that serves his 
 religion, his prince, and his country, with ardour 
 
HUMOUR, TRAGEDY, RELIGION 113 
 
 and devotion, need not plead his cause with the 
 commonplace rant of romantic passion — the 
 woman whom he honours with his love, becomes 
 his debtor, and her corresponding affection is 
 engaged to repay his glorious toil." Here love 
 passes into public service. The speech is typical 
 of Scott's whole attitude to the commonplace 
 machinery of the novel. The hero, the heroine, 
 the love-story, are not his main interests ; what 
 attracts him is the big world where men and 
 women play a part in state-affairs, or the everyday 
 life around him, so humorous and yet so pathetic 
 in its endless combinations. It must be remem- 
 bered, too, that the greatest love-stories probably 
 embody the dreams of a man's youth, and that 
 Scott was a middle-aged country gentleman and 
 lawyer when he began to write the novels. There 
 is a trace of the easy tolerance of the middle- 
 aged man of the world in his attitude to these 
 young people who think the state of their hearts 
 so important. He recognises the passion as very 
 fit and proper for people of their age. But it 
 does not matter very much ; they will soon settle 
 down, and take life less strenuously, and know 
 better. 
 
 Not only in the Introduction to " The 
 Betrothed " does Scott laugh at his ill-success 
 in the conventional parts of the novel. In a 
 
ii 4 WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 letter to Ellis written in January, 1813, he bewails 
 his short-comings in character-drawing, and 
 attributes them to his cattle-stealing ancestry. 
 " The worst," he writes, " of all my undertakings 
 is that my rogue, always in despite of me, turns 
 out my hero." Here again Scott puts criticism 
 on the right track. He was writing, of course, 
 of " Rokeby," but the words apply much more 
 closely to the novels. What he really means to 
 indicate here is the sort of character in which 
 he is interested. The traditional place of the hero 
 is never actually usurped ; the excellent young 
 man is allowed to walk along his beaten track 
 and win or lose the amiable heroine. But it is 
 not to such characters that the author surrenders 
 himself. The men who interest him are noble 
 rogues like Rob Roy or Nanty Ewart, soldiers 
 of fortune like Claverhouse or Dugald Dalgetty, 
 men of humour like Oldbuck or the Bailie. His 
 remark in the letter is, indeed, not sufficiently 
 comprehensive. The truth is that the character 
 he best understands must be mature and well- 
 developed, with well-defined characteristics and 
 strong features. Men and women who have the 
 stamp of their trade or profession, who exhibit 
 any idiosyncracy or oddity of mind, or to whom 
 way of life and uncommon experience have given 
 a peculiar way of thinking — these are the charac- 
 
HUMOUR, TRAGEDY, RELIGION 115 
 
 ters of the Waverley Novels who have earned a 
 place in the living world of literature. 
 
 In such characterisation Scott best displays his 
 humour. He writes no comedies ; he constructs 
 no comic plots. The subtlety of a writer like Mr. 
 Meredith, who can make a comic conception of 
 character the hinge upon which turns the plot of 
 a book like " The Egoist," or a tailor who dies 
 on the first page the greatest influence and the 
 greatest character of a book like " Evan Harring- 
 ton," is no part of Scott's genius. But in broad, 
 genial, shrewd comic characterisation he is almost 
 unsurpassed. The incongruity of temperament 
 and circumstance, of youth and age, of profession 
 and practice ; the whimsicality of a hobby carried 
 to excess or of an indiseriminating devotion ; the 
 ludicrousness of misplaced sentiment and hot- 
 headed zeal — he sees the humour of it all and 
 paints it with broad, firm brush. Delicate shades 
 of ridicule, subtle touches of fun which titillate 
 the laughter-loving spirit, escape from him. 
 Lockhart tells us that he was not a sensitive man, 
 and was conscious only of strong scents and clear 
 sounds. In the spiritual world he shows, with 
 some remarkable exceptions, the same lack of 
 acute consciousness. On the whole, in humour 
 as in history he could only do " the Big 
 Bow-Wow." Yet here again his method has 
 
n6 WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 compensations. A writer intensely conscious of 
 what is ridiculous is inclined to fool his readers 
 to the top of his bent, to be the wit who follows 
 his humorous fancy at the expense of truth to 
 life and sanity of sentiment. Scott looking at 
 life with the eyes of a humorist, not of a wit, 
 paints it with the calm aloofness of one who sees 
 the humorous incongruity passing into the tragic. 
 He is most like Shakespeare in his blending of 
 humour and pathos. The tow-wig, Law-Latin, 
 small-beer and self-importance of Peter Peebles, 
 are sufficiently comic. Yet one pities the poor 
 wretch. He is almost a pathetic figure, not 
 because he is poor and wretched, but because the 
 buffets of fortune have not taught him the mercy 
 which seasons justice. He is still the same self- 
 seeker who turned Ewart's land-lady into the 
 street. Caleb Balderstone, again, is an unselfish 
 Falstaff in his endless expedients for the honour 
 of the family. But his devotion gives him a 
 pathetic significance. We do not smile when we 
 remember the faithful old man watching the 
 threshold of his master's chamber, or drawing the 
 feather from the streaming tide. Tears, not 
 laughter, come to us then. 
 
 Criticism must linger over Scott's characterisa- 
 tion, for it is the most valuable part of his work. 
 Even critics like Taine who accuse Scott's men 
 
HUMOUR, TRAGEDY, RELIGION 117 
 
 and women of being artificial, refute their own 
 statements by admitting that his name calls up 
 a whole world of characters. A few broad types 
 may be specified. Nothing shows better his 
 objective view of life than his picture of Scots 
 law and lawyers. It was only pique and dis- 
 appointed ambition that made Scott at times deride 
 the law. In reality he was a sound and able 
 lawyer, whose services as Sheriff of Selkirk won 
 a well-deserved tribute from the inhabitants of 
 the county. Scots law he loved as a most 
 characteristic national institution, and the men of 
 the robe in Scotland were among his dearest 
 friends. Yet of no profession has he given such 
 a ludicrous picture. He does justice to its serious 
 and practical side ; it is this law which threatens 
 Sir Arthur Wardour's estate and condemns Erne 
 Deans to death. But what he really delights in 
 are the humours of the profession. It is humorous 
 that a man should be a leading figure in a sober 
 and serious calling and yet a reveller and sharer 
 in ' high jinks ' ; that the legal terms which come 
 as fitly from a stately Clerk of Session should be 
 babbled, in season and out of season, by a crazed 
 and drunken pauper, that the assiduity of attention 
 and legal memory which make a great advocate 
 should be the whim and pastime of a conceited 
 saddler. Far be it from Scott to deny the import- 
 
n8 WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 ance of law. But if it be given too important 
 a place, or the chief place, there is incongruity, 
 humour. And thus the author smiles when Bailie 
 M'Wheeble exclaims : " an his honour winna 
 believe the Leviticus, he might aye believe the 
 Statute-book." 
 
 It is in the portraiture of character which is 
 distinctively Scottish that the author's power of 
 characterisation is at its height. With what large 
 tolerance and imaginative sympathy he enters into 
 the bourgeois and peasant life of his country! 
 Dandie Dinmont, Bailie Nicol Jarvie, Dugald 
 Dalgetty, are all of the bourgeois type, somewhat 
 vulgar in mind, in manners, in expression. But 
 not for a moment is the novelist's attitude that 
 of intellectual superiority or caustic satire. He 
 loves such men and enters into their life with the 
 delight of a humorist. In other hands the Bailie 
 might easily become an unattractive figure. He 
 is a shrewd, industrious business man, with the 
 precise and punctual habits of his class, a strict 
 Presbyterian, a rigid keeper of the Sabbath, a 
 hater of theatres and all their works. The 
 romantic side of life or nature has no attraction 
 for him ; he has no comprehension of the dignity 
 of the Highland character, above whose Honour 
 he places his own idol, Credit. Such a man might 
 easily win dislike or ridicule. But is there a reader 
 
HUMOUR, TRAGEDY, RELIGION 119 
 
 of " Rob Roy " who does not both like and respect 
 the Bailie? Scott is alive to the advantages of 
 the practical nature ; the Bailie has a statesman- 
 like sense of the good of the Union, and if he 
 is dead to much that is noble in the Highland 
 character, he has sincere pity for the Celtic people 
 and an earnest desire to find them honest employ- 
 ment. Thus he wins our respect. Moreover, 
 placed in circumstances where his c mechanical 
 notions ' are of no avail and the pen must be 
 exchanged for the poker, he is a most comical 
 figure and therefore, as is the case with all men 
 at whom we laugh heartily, really liked. He is 
 brave as a lion, never more so than when he 
 protests against the murder of Morris ; generous 
 and warm-hearted, as is proved by his kindness 
 to Frank and to Mattie ; devoted to the memory 
 of his worthy father ; proud of his civic position. 
 Most humanly consistent in his inconsistency, the 
 democratic merchant has a secret pride in his 
 gentle connection. Here is a real, living man. 
 Nor is Dugald Dalgetty any less human. He is 
 a distant relation of Jack FalstafT, with a like 
 philosophy which reconciles the inconsistencies of 
 life and especially the conflicting merits of Pay 
 and Honour. He is a rude, vulgar soldier, 
 shameless, vain, loquacious, pedantic and greedy. 
 But he is also brave, faithful to his pay-masters, 
 
120 WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 generous to his friends, kind to his horse, full 
 of resource, wit, and knowledge of the world. 
 The genius of his creator has united all these 
 characteristics in one most natural and most like- 
 able soldier. Finally, this born sceptic is exhibited 
 by Scott's delightful irony as still possessing the 
 Scottish attachment to a family estate, and willing 
 to undergo the ordeal of marriage with an 
 Aberdeen Covenanter's widow to secure his old 
 lands of Drumthwacket ! 
 
 One remark applies to all Scott's men of this 
 type ; they are at bottom thoroughly good fellows. 
 When the Bailie says : " I canna meddle wi' a 
 friend's business but I aye end wi' making it 
 my ain " ; when Dandie Dinmont refuses to 
 employ his wealth to over-reach Jock o' Dawston 
 Cleugh in the plea about the land which feeds 
 " a hog or aiblins twa in a good year " ; when 
 Hobbie Eliot, saved from ruin by the Dwarf's 
 gift, exclaims : " It's a queer thing, but I canna 
 joy in the gear unless I ken'd the puir body was 
 happy that gave it me": — we are subdued by 
 the natural goodness of these men and understand 
 the constraint they lay upon the affection of the 
 writer. 
 
 Nowadays the Scots peasant is a familiar figure 
 in literature. But none of his modern painters 
 deserves to be mentioned in the same breath with 
 
HUMOUR, TRAGEDY, RELIGION 121 
 
 Scott, who paints him absolutely as he is, with 
 no false sentiment or extravagance. He has a 
 perfect understanding of the genius of the poorer 
 children of the Scottish soil. Centuries of 
 national adversity during which life was hard 
 at home and the national honour hard to maintain 
 abroad, have stamped the people with the character 
 which men like Cuddie Headrigg and Richie 
 Moniplies and Andrew Fairservice display. It is 
 a character easy to laugh at. But it has a phil- 
 osophy of its own. Truth and honour and 
 kindness to one's neighbour are good things ; they 
 must be observed, or else the hell of Calvin 
 awaits us. But men, struggling for a livelihood 
 in a poor country, are natural enemies. This 
 circumstance must affect our conduct ; if we are 
 asked our business, the questioner must be put off 
 by indirect answers or led into self revelation by 
 an interrogatory reply. Though poor, we are as 
 good as our neighbours and ought to assert our 
 self-consequence even in high places. English- 
 men are certain to insult our country ; patriotic 
 pride will excuse us if we depart from the strict 
 truth and maintain that the lanes of Edinburgh 
 are finer than the broad highways on the banks of 
 Thames. We must not be misunderstood; we 
 are really worthy men, though a stranger may 
 think we seek goodness in a very roundabout 
 
 Q 
 
122 WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 fashion. This is the basis of the Scots peasant 
 character as conceived by Scott. He has an 
 immense liking for such a type, for if it is capable 
 of descending to meanness and self-interest, it is 
 also capable of rising to great heights of devotion. 
 It is true that, while Cuddie is altogether pleasing, 
 Andrew Fairservice has some very unpleasant 
 traits. His caution becomes cowardice when he 
 retires behind a barrel at fighting-time ; his 
 learning pedantry when it consists of the know- 
 ledge of the botanical names of flowers ; his 
 financial ability deceit when he sells his master's 
 apples or steals his mare. Yet Scott — and every 
 sympathetic reader — has a sneaking affection for 
 the rogue. For at bottom he, too, is a humorist, 
 and in the solution of his humour he dissolves 
 many faults. He did dispose of his master's 
 mare. But he is no thief. He is really the bene- 
 factor of that extravagant young gentleman, Mr. 
 Frank Osbaldistone. " The horse was expensive 
 to keep at livery " ! Aye, Andrew Fairservice, 
 thou art a man much misunderstood! 
 
 For comic effect, then, Scott depends mainly 
 on character-drawing. He makes only one 
 important departure from this general rule. Some- 
 times he employs humorous < type-names,' which 
 label a man with his character or trade. One 
 might construct a Jonsonian comedy, a " Waverley 
 
HUMOUR, TRAGEDY, RELIGION 123 
 
 Fair," with such people. The Jonsonian flavour 
 is in no way spoiled by the Scots dialect, for 
 Jonson's masques are full of such dialectical 
 variations. We need not invent a plot for this 
 comedy, but we may at least describe the groups. 
 Heedless of the noisy surroundings, Heavysterne, 
 Dryasdust, and Mumblazon are discussing an 
 intricate point of heraldry, often interrupted by 
 the loquacious Clutterbuck and sublimely ignored 
 by Cleishbotham, who would like to cane the small 
 boys who are throwing nut-shells. Not far away 
 M'Turk and Touchwood are engaged in a violent 
 altercation with Sir Peter Peppercorn and Sir 
 Mungo Malagrowther ; Sweep-clean, the bailiff, 
 prompted by the attorney, Win-the-fight, is hurry- 
 ing up to arrest the first man who breaks the peace, 
 while Raredrench, the apothecary, is preparing 
 his plasters in expectation of a purchase. At 
 Pindivide's stall Holdforth and Poundtext are 
 overwhelming the unfortunate Episcopalian, 
 Dummerar, with arguments on the meaning of 
 effectual calling. Jack Bunce and Wildrake 
 have just been signing bills in the office of the 
 old usurer Trapbois ; Woodcock, the jolly falconer, 
 is treating his fellow-servant, David Dibble, the 
 gardener, at Mrs. Shortcake's stall, and Whitecraft, 
 the miller, who has ridden into town on one of 
 Briddlesley's horses, is having a stirrup mended 
 
i2 4 WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 by Saddletree. There seems, however, to be 
 some trouble brewing, for the lawyers — Fairscribe, 
 Doublefee, and Bindlose — have come together out 
 of the crowd and are consulting with serious faces. 
 The bailiffs are coming now ; all must go before 
 the magistrate. And to give a true comedy 
 decision which shall dispel all the troubles of 
 " Waverley Fair," who is so fit as Justice Blindas ? 
 One class of Scott's characters surpasses those 
 of any other English writer. His love for animals 
 has given to the dogs and horses of his novels 
 an almost human interest. Ban and Bus-car, 
 Fangs, Bevis, Lufra ; Dumple, Rosabelle, Gus- 
 tavus ; these dogs and horses are our friends 
 almost as much as their owners. Chaucer has 
 an eye for the points of a horse, but the Seaman's 
 rouncy and the Reve's Scott have not the individu- 
 ality of Dumple and Gustavus and Rory Bean. 
 Scott's dogs are studies from the life ; Bevis is 
 an immortal portrait of the well-loved Maida. 
 His treatment of the attitude of his characters 
 to dumb animals is admirable. He loves to make 
 a man express his better nature in this way. The 
 tenderness underlying the stern character of David 
 Deans reveals itself in his care for Effie's cow. 
 Dandie Dinmont shows his affection for young 
 Bertram by kindness to his terrior, Wasp. Hobbie 
 Eliot can think of no way of requiting the Dwarf's 
 
. HUMOUR, TRAGEDY, RELIGION 125 
 
 generosity but by taking charge of his goat and 
 bees. Gurth is only really angry with Cedric when 
 he flings his javelin at Fangs. 
 
 Here there is sound psychology, accurate obser- 
 vation, dramatic insight. A critic like Professor 
 Herford, who maintains that in these respects 
 Scott's gifts are very ordinary, might object that 
 such observation as we have noted is the natural 
 gift of a sportsman and country gentleman. But 
 Scott shows the same power in departments of 
 life which are closed to the observation of the 
 ordinary type of Tweedside laird. His treatment 
 of abnormal characters like Madge Wildfire and 
 Wamba shows a subtlety very different from his 
 usual blunt perception. Having a very sound 
 understanding of all that is normal, sane, and 
 orderly, he has a wonderful comprehension of the 
 opposed world of extravagance, illusion, and 
 disorder. Wamba and Madge Wildfire have 
 extraordinary insight, quickness, and cunning. 
 Their minds form fantastic notions which repre- 
 sent general truth in a vivid fashion ; Wamba's 
 philological lecture or his account of the outlaw's 
 arithmetic is a good example. But, at the same 
 time, they are partly foolish, and the disturbance 
 which follows the incapacity for connected thinking 
 is seen in Wamba's restlessness on horseback 
 or Madge's aimless wandering. Both are subject 
 
126 WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 to the touches of nature which make the sane 
 and the insane kin ; Wamba shows invincible 
 fidelity to master and fellow-servant, and poor 
 Madge has a confused memory of a drink of 
 milk once given her by Jeanie Deans. Scott 
 understands, too, that an insane person is, as it 
 were, an artist in life, conscious of the aesthetic 
 aspect of things. Madge has almost a poet's 
 pleasure in a moon-lit landscape, and the genius 
 of a dramatist in devising a scene. 
 
 But there are a thousand touches and sugges- 
 tions in the novels which show that Scott, far 
 more than criticism generally admits, has investi- 
 gated many of the most curious corners and 
 recesses of the human mind. He deserves a 
 high place among the masters of dramatic 
 psychology. Wildrake, the jovial, careless, kind- 
 hearted spendthrift, is adored by all children. 
 Wayland Smith, the strong physical nature, has 
 an almost overwhelming horror of Alasco, the 
 poisoner. Alasco, the cheating astrologer and 
 rogue, has a real belief in the philosopher's stone. 
 Antony Foster, a bad man and the servant of bad 
 men, has strong faith in the worth of religion, 
 and a hope that he may be saved by the piety 
 of his daughter. Catherine Seyton, the wor- 
 shipper of Queen Mary, the inciter to great 
 deeds, falters in her high resolution when she 
 
HUMOUR, TRAGEDY, RELIGION 127 
 
 thinks that she may be sending her lover into 
 danger. Rashleigh, the deformed plausible 
 scoundrel, charms his victims by the mellow 
 beauty of his voice as does the serpent by the 
 waving to and fro of its head. The influence 
 of descent or of external surroundings is not lost 
 sight of. Julia Mannering has a decided resemb- 
 lance to her foolish mother and also something 
 of her father's self-will ; Dumbiedykes, the 
 purely passive mind, very naturally marries the 
 lady who sits next him in church. The reader 
 of the novels receives a strong impression of vast 
 resources waiting to be developed. Often a 
 character, introduced for only a few pages, strikes 
 us as so rich and original that we desire his better 
 acquaintance. Luke Lundin, the steward and 
 physician of Kinross, and Blinkhoolie, the philo- 
 sophic gardener ; Barbara Suddlechop and Laurie 
 Linklater ; Johnny Mortheuch, the sexton in 
 " The Bride " ; John Davis, the worthy guard 
 of the fishing-station in " Redgauntlet " — it is 
 only a writer of the greatest creative genius who 
 is able to give individuality to minor characters 
 such as these. 
 
 Scott is not among the supreme writers of 
 tragedy, and, indeed, he does not often aim at 
 tragic effect. But he is capable of conceiving 
 pure and poignant tragedy both of character and 
 
128 WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 circumstance. " The Bride of Lammermoor," 
 his most ambitious attempt in this manner, is not 
 perhaps his most successful, for although there is 
 tragic pathos in Lucy's Desdemona-like helpless- 
 ness and inward turn of thought, still Sir Leslie 
 Stephen's criticism of the author's interest in 
 Ravenswood as divided between the decayed 
 gentleman and the lover, has much force. The 
 plot of " St. Ronan's Well," too, was robbed of 
 its tragic effect by James Ballantyne's interference. 
 But "The Highland Widow" and "The Two 
 Drovers " are tragedies of great power, the latter 
 of which is haunted from the very first by a sense 
 of impending doom. Perhaps the most pathetic 
 figures Scott ever drew are Elspat, unable to con- 
 form to new ideas her conception of Highland 
 honour and all that makes a man, and driving her 
 son to crime and death ; Hamish, standing between 
 the old and the new, torn by filial devotion and 
 military discipline; Robin Oig M'Combich, the 
 noble and generous. Highlander, overwhelmed in 
 the world-old tragedy of the clash of rival codes 
 of honour. There are two well-known characters 
 in the novels who gain in value if their tragic 
 significance be noted. One is the Templar, Brian 
 de Bois-Guilbert. He is ruthless, ambitious, 
 passionate, stained with crime. But the greatness 
 of his ambition, his courage, constancy, and force 
 
HUMOUR, TRAGEDY, RELIGION 129 
 
 of mind, win the respect of the reader, and a 
 touch of pathos is added to his character because 
 his sternness springs not from natural perversity, 
 but the disappointment which followed the 
 treachery of his early love. Into this man's 
 life comes Rebecca, the Jewess. Henceforth his 
 soul is the seat of a terrible struggle of good and 
 evil. Long-dead impulses live again ; during 
 these passion-tossed days at Templestowe he is 
 really a better man than he has been for years. 
 This love for Rebecca seems to be his ruin, but 
 it really saves him. For when he enters the lists 
 against Ivanhoe the struggle of good and evil 
 within him is not over; his better nature has 
 not yet yielded ; in the throes of that mighty 
 conflict he dies. Here is the tragedy of a great 
 spirit. Scott's other study in the tragedy of a 
 soul is Nanty Ewart. His life-history is sad 
 enough — an old father's heart broken, a woman 
 brought to poverty and death, a young girl ruined 
 and led into sin, a career of crime on the Spanish 
 Main, great gifts sapped by drunkenness and lack 
 of self-control. Yet the consecrating and redeem- 
 ing influences of life have never lost their hold 
 upon this wild sailor. No bad man could be so 
 blighted with remorse. The crimes of his youth 
 have been the result of carelessness, or ill-fortune, 
 or hot blood. At bottom he is a generous, truth- 
 
i 3 o WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 loving soul, faithful to his word, ready to help 
 a friend, absolutely unselfish. Placed in a position 
 where his honour is rooted in dishonour, where he 
 must protect Jacobites whom he detests and serve 
 faithfully masters he despises, he hides the misery 
 of his heart beneath a jaunty wit and assumed 
 bravado. Just at a time when his self-confession 
 to Alan has led him to see clearly the trend of his 
 life, comes the crisis of Nixon's temptation. 
 Then, in a moment, the better side of the man 
 triumphs, and like Webster's Bosola, a much 
 worse man, he takes his stand, once and for ail, 
 on the side of the good. His death is the tragic 
 redemption of a soul. 
 
 Only a spiritual nature could conceive such a 
 tragedy. Scott's comprehension of the spiritual 
 world is limited. The intellectual speculation, 
 the probing self-examination of a Hamlet, lie 
 beyond the reach of his genius ; to-day this is 
 what we miss most. He is unconscious of such 
 impulses in himself, and does not understand them 
 in other men. Nor does he concern himself with 
 theological code or theory ; both as man and 
 novelist he acquiesces in an easy religious con- 
 ventionality. But the author of the Waverley 
 Novels was a religious man in the most intimate 
 sense of the term. In the moral order of the 
 universe he has a profound belief. Even a 
 
HUMOUR, TRAGEDY, RELIGION 131 
 
 fighting romance like " Ivanhoe " has its ethical 
 interest. The knights seek the good in their 
 chivalrous code, the outlaws in their ' fair dealing,' 
 the serfs in their loyalty to Cedric ; Rebecca and 
 the Templar have to consider the moral worth 
 of self-interest. "The Heart of Midlothian," 
 although its primary motive is purely artistic, is 
 a noble imaginative sermon on the retribution 
 which follows sin. Madge Wildfire has an ethical 
 as well as an aesthetic significance. As a girl she 
 had been seduced by Staunton, and the trouble 
 which followed the murder of her child had driven 
 her into poverty and crazed her brain. Now she 
 flits across the stage of the novel like the Nemesis 
 which follows crime or the remorse which haunts 
 a sin-stricken mind. It is she who steals Effie's 
 child ; it is her mother who almost foils Jeanie's 
 plan of rescue. The guilty Staunton cannot rest 
 until he finds the child of his sin ; he does so 
 only to be slain by him in the scene of his former 
 smuggling exploits. All through this novel one 
 feels that the moralist who lies hid in the brain 
 of great Scottish writers, is working in this 
 unconscious sort of way ; if only the plot could 
 have been worked out in other fashion a shallower 
 writer would probably have made Jeanie c splendide 
 mendax ' for her sister's sake. 
 
 Finally, " the distribution of happiness at the 
 
1 32 WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 end of the piece " was one of the departments of 
 his work, which Scott was willing to resign to the 
 steam-engine. If we take him seriously, he was 
 here doing himself a great injustice. Often his 
 picture of the issues of life is marred by careless- 
 ness and respect for convention. Or sometimes 
 he plays the part of a kindly Providence to his 
 characters. He treats young Quentin in this 
 way — " a moral of excellent tendency for the 
 encouragement of all fair-haired, blue-eyed, long- 
 legged, stout-hearted emigrants from my native 
 country." For a chivalrous tale of this kind the 
 moral is admirable. But elsewhere he rises to a 
 finer and spiritual conception of the righteous 
 inequality of the distribution of happiness. 
 Rebecca is the stock example of such treatment, 
 and in the " Ivanhoe " preface Scott has defended 
 his conception in noble terms. Less often noticed 
 is Minna, in " The Pirate." Happiness of the 
 ordinary type could not be for her. There was 
 something unnatural in the passion for Cleveland : 
 " the gods are deaf to hot and peevish vows." 
 But Scott, understanding the purification which 
 sorrow brings to such a nature, turns round upon 
 the reader and declares that she did attain true 
 happiness. In one of the few lucid moments of 
 the last sad days at Abbotsford, Scott exclaimed 
 to Lockhart : " My dear, be a good man — be 
 
HUMOUR, TRAGEDY, RELIGION 133 
 
 virtuous — be religious — be a good man. Noth- 
 ing else will give you any comfort when you come 
 to lie here." The man who in his dying days 
 placed such value upon goodness, was the author 
 of the Waverley Novels. 
 
EPILOGUE 
 
 It is not our purpose to trace the followers and 
 imitators of Walter Scott. They are an innumer- 
 able multitude, worthy and unworthy, and without 
 detailed treatment selection would be invidious. 
 The lines with which Drayton closes his epistle 
 to Reynolds may here serve our turn : 
 
 " Upon our stages in these latter days 
 There are so many, let them have their bays 
 That do deserve them ; let those wits that haunt 
 Those public circuits, let them freely chaunt 
 Their fine composures and their praise pursue." 
 
 Could great writers live again, perhaps nothing 
 would please Scott more than the way in which 
 his compatriots in literature have looked up to 
 him as the king of Scottish letters. It is not 
 uninteresting to note that the Appin Murder was 
 first told to the reading public in the preface of 
 " Rob Roy," and that David Balfour has followed 
 Lovel and Oldbuck to the Hawes Inn. Stevenson 
 thought that a Scottish writer's greatest merit was 
 
EPILOGUE 135 
 
 to be worthy of the praise of Scott, and wrote 
 to Mr. J. M. Barrie : " There are two of us now 
 that the Shirra might have patted on the head." 
 
 We have surveyed Scott's work as a writer of 
 fiction, finding much to blame, much more to 
 praise. And yet, when writing of his work, one 
 must always come back to the man. Even Carlyle 
 is subdued by the force of his personal worth, 
 and led to exclaim : " No sounder piece of 
 British manhood was put together in that 
 eighteenth century of time." His life-story 
 must always be a stimulus to all who love brave 
 and enduring men. Long ago, in some lines 
 of " Marmion " which no one seems to have 
 remarked, he predicted his own fate: 
 
 " Our youthful summer oft we see 
 Dance by on wings of game and glee, 
 While the dark storm reserves its rage 
 Against the winter of our age." 
 
 The record of the fortitude and courage with 
 which the old fighter faced the tempest is one of 
 the heroic stories of literature. 
 
 But we need not go to the external record of 
 his life to understand the worth of the man. His 
 strong personality pervades and informs the 
 novels. There we may share his unrivalled 
 conversation, enter into his kindly humour, 
 appreciate his shrewd estimate of men and things, 
 
136 WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 be braced by his vigorous courage and mental 
 health. The reading of a Waverley Novel is a 
 journey with one of the most charming comrades 
 in the world. 
 
 Human friendship is perhaps the most valuable 
 thing in life. But disposition and fancy change, 
 or wishing having no body in it, may fail to 
 transcend the distances of time and space. It is 
 the glory of intellectual companionship that it 
 soars above time and space and fickle fancy. 
 Perhaps no companion of imagination has always 
 so ready a welcome as Walter Scott. 
 
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