SIR WALTER SCOTT.
MR. BALFOUR said well yesterday week in the Chapter House of Westminster Abbey that happy as was Sir Walter Scott's style in so painting his large canvases as to give us an adequate conception of the most striking scenes of a long past, it was not mainly in his style, but in the matter of his inimitable stories, that he has surpassed all the other writers of English romance. It is true enough that Scott repre- sented, and represented as no other writer has ever represented, the reaction against the abstract doctrines of the eighteenth century, and substituted for them the concrete and rich detail of which his imagination was so full. But by that very capacity for combining all the glow and colour of a picturesque past with the concrete historic figures and vivacity of detail in which that past life attained its greatest dignity and interest, Scott deviated from the earlier conception of romance and mingled with it the criticism of a broad sagacity and the business insight of a shrewd realist. Sir Walter hardly ever takes us into a dull world, but nevertheless never into an unreal or abstract world. His history is, as Mr. Balfour said, often inaccurate ;—indeed, it was usually made intentionally so, that he might give a more con- centrated picture of that which struck his own imagina- tion most powerfully. His inaccuracy was almost always of a kind which gave the impression of the truth far better than the most painstaking accuracy ever could have given it. Indeed, so far as we differ from Mr. Balfour at all, it would be in doubting whether Scott did depend so much on the opportuneness of his gifts for the special temper of the world in which he lived, as Mr. Balfour suggests It may well be that the genius of some men is so great that they really create the demand for what they can bestow. And of these Sir Walter Scott seems to us one of the moat con- spicuous. There is something so large and simple in his genius, that his readers hardly think of themselves as readers of mere romance. The peasants are drawn as vividly as the Kings, and the Kings as the peasants. His readers are admitted to the very heart of reality, even when the romantic touch is most vigorous.
Scott never gives you the sense of confining his interest to his story. There is always a lifelike background, a sense of the largeness and complexity of human life, of its business, and of its manifold enterprises clashing against each other, which takes you out of the narrow interests of passion and mere adventure. In " Kenilworth " we have Queen Elizabeth playing off her nobles against each other as only a great Queen could do it; in " The Fortunes of Nigel " the fussy and timid James consoles himself for his own conscious weakness by displaying gleams of shrewdness even when he is cowering before his own courtiers ; in " The Heart of Midlothian" a canny Scotch nobleman avails himself of Queen Caroline's deep sense of what was in the larger sense expedient because it was just, and just because it was ex- pedient, to obtain a pardon for the sister of the heroine ; in "Ivanhoe" a moat picturesque contrast is drawn between the crafty dealings of the great order of the Templars and the heavy Saxon nobles with their clumsy strength and dull straightforwardness ; in " Old Mortality " the mind is fixed on the contest between the stern Puritan fanatics and the military cold-bloodedness of Claverhonse and his soldiers ; in " Anne of Geierstein," the heart-broken pride of Margaret of Anjou dying in the midst of King Renee vain and shallow and tinsel Court, is painted with singular force. Everywhere in Scott's stories you see a large background depicting the real affairs of the world, and you feel as if you were moving amidst the bewildering paradoxes of human nature on a large scale, and not on the narrow stage of mere adventure or romance. Nor is it in the field of the greater historic exploits alone that you feel the touch of a vivid realism. Not only is Louis XI. pictured in all his courage and craft and superstition, over-finessing his own hand in hie eagerness to master the mad rages of his powerful vassal, Charles the Bold, but in the very same story we have the most lively picture of the singular combination of cold treachery and tenacious gratitude in the tribes of gipsies who were just then spreading over Europe ; and, again, the rashness and shrewdness of those great Flemish burghers who, with all their keenness for commercial gain, were so arrogant and heady as to risk all their wealth on the fortunes of an unequal contest with the great military Power of Burgundy, in credu- lous reliance on the secret promises of a wily French King who never hesitated to sacrifice an ally when he failed to mature his crafty schemes, is set before us with equal power. Again, what could be more striking than Scott's intimacy with all the details of the life of the poor, when he paints the toil and griefs of the poor fisher- men and fishwomen on the coast of Fife, or the dumb fidelity of the Saxon serf, or the struggles in the heart of the father of Jeannie and Effie Deans, when he has to choose between love for his daughter and fidelity to his religion ; or the humours of the Scotch vagrant, Edie Ochiltree, or the didactic conceit and selfish unscrupulousness of the Pharisaic gardener, Andrew Fairservice? Scott is as much at home with the serving men as he is with the Queens and Kings with whom his imagination delighted to busy itself. Everywhere you see large glimpses of the real world through the spacious windows of his glowing mind and memory. He is as familiar with the kitchen of the palace as he is with its Court. The Earl of Murray's menials are as powerfully suggested as his grim counsellors and jealous rivals, and James L's cook is almost as necessary a figure in the picture of his Court at Westminster as is Buckingham or Prince Charles. This it is which makes Scott's romances so much more fascinating than ordinary novels. They fill you with the sense of the greatness and complexity of the world, and yet they never weary you with those long digressions with which the more ambitious writers of romance try to fill In the background of their story. Compare Scott's stories, for instance, with Bulwer'a " Last Days of Pompeii," or " Last 1
of the Barons," and you sce immediately the vast superiority of the former in mingling the realities of life with the glow of passion and the charm of pageant.
Of course it is quite true that Scott is not always at his best. Walking ladies and gentlemen, like Rowena in " Ivanhoe,"
or Isabella Wardonr in "The Antiquary," glide through his pages and hardly leave a trace on the memory. The humour of his " introductions " as well as of the tags to
which his oddities are addicted, is often overweighted, is often heavy. We weary of his Jedediah Cleishbottom, and even of Lady Margaret Bellenden in her castle of Tillietudlem. Nor are his semi-supernatural personages like Meg Merrilies and Magdalen Graeme as impressive as they ought to be. But yet he has a great genius for that touch of madness which makes both his daft Scotch boys, and his pictures of genuine mental excitement, like that of Madge Wildfire, so effective.
There was a hare-brained element in Scott that when it really took possession of him was full of eeriness, all the more that his great breadth of sober sense threw it out with singularly vivid force. There is nothing more power- ful than his picture of Mary Stuart's mind in " The Abbot," when it gets unhinged in recalling the tragedies of her earlier life; or than the scenes in the "Bride of Lammer- moor" where Lucy Ashton's anguish turns her brain. Even in his own life, in the journal which he kept of his private dreads and sufferings, one sees traces of the fire of that great imagination when it carried him beyond the control of his cool and lucid judgment.. Without that strain of wildness in Scott which showed itself in such despair as the motto which he wrote when he first realised the failing of his genius, in "Count Robert of Paris," we should never have had the greatest of all our imaginative writers excepting only Shakespeare :-
" The storm increases—'tis no sunny shower Fostered in the moist breast of March or April, Or such as parched Summer cools his lip with ; Heaven's windows are flung wide ; the inmost deepa Call, in hoarse greetings, one upon another; On comes the flood in all its foaming horrors, And where's the dike shall stop it ?"
There, and in the burst of chivalrous feeling that suggested the verse,
"Sound, sound the Clarion, fill the fifo, To all the sensual world proclaim One crowded hour of glorious life
Is worth a world without a name,"—
we have the touch of fire that electrified into living and moving forms all the massive contents of that great mind,—and that went far towards shattering his earthly happiness while it secured his everlasting fame.
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