Walter Scott: Waverley, Guy Mannering & The Antiquary (3 Books in One Edition). Walter Scott

His correspondent requested Scott to write something on such variations of taste, which actually seem to be in the air and epidemic, for they affect, as she remarked, young people who have not heard the criticisms of their elders.⁷ Thus Rousseau’s “Nouvelle Heloise,” once so fascinating to girls, and reputed so dangerous, had become tedious to the young, Lady Louisa says, even in 1821. But to the young, if they have any fancy and intelligence, Scott is not tedious even now; and probably his most devoted readers are boys, girls, and men of matured appreciation and considerable knowledge of literature. The unformed and the cultivated tastes are still at one about Scott. He holds us yet with his unpremeditated art, his natural qualities of friendliness, of humour, of sympathy. Even the carelessness with which his earliest and his kindest critics — Ellis, Erskine, and Lady Louisa Stuart — reproached him has not succeeded in killing his work and diminishing his renown.

      It is style, as critics remind us, it is perfection of form, no doubt, that secure the permanence of literature; but Scott did not overstate his own defects when he wrote in his Journal (April 22, 1826): “A solecism in point of composition, like a Scotch word, is indifferent to me. I never learned grammar. . . . I believe the bailiff in ‘The Goodnatured Man’ is not far wrong when he says: ‘One man has one way of expressing himself, and another another; and that is all the difference between them.’” The difference between Scott and Thackeray or Flaubert among good writers, and a crowd of self-conscious and mannered “stylists” among writers not so very good, is essential. About Shakspeare it was said that he “never blotted a line.” The observation is almost literally true about Sir Walter. The pages of his manuscript novels show scarcely a retouch or an erasure, whether in the “Waverley” fragment of 1805 or the unpublished “Siege of Malta” of 1832.⁸

      The handwriting becomes closer and smaller; from thirty-eight lines to the page in “Waverley,” he advances to between fifty and sixty in “Ivanhoe.” The few alterations are usually additions. For example, a fresh pedantry of the Baron of Bradwardine’s is occasionally set down on the opposite page. Nothing can be less like the method of Flaubert or the method of Mr. Ruskin, who tells us that “a sentence of ‘Modern Painters’ was often written four or five tunes over in my own hand, and tried in every word for perhaps an hour, — perhaps a forenoon, — before it was passed for the printer.” Each writer has his method; Scott was no stipples or niggler, but, as we shall see later, he often altered much in his proof-sheets. ⁹

      As long as he was understood, he was almost reckless of well- constructed sentences, of the one best word for his meaning, of rounded periods. This indifference is not to be praised, but it is only a proof of his greatness that his style, never distinguished, and often lax, has not impaired the vitality of his prose. The heart which beats in his works, the knowledge of human nature, the dramatic vigour of his character, the nobility of his whole being win the day against the looseness of his manner, the negligence of his composition, against the haste of fatigue which set him, as Lady Louisa Stuart often told him, on “huddling up a conclusion anyhow, and so kicking the book out of his way.” In this matter of denouements he certainly was no more careful than Shakspeare or Moliere.

      The permanence of Sir Walter’s romances is proved, as we said, by their survival among all the changes of fashion in the art of fiction. When he took up his pen to begin “Waverley,” fiction had not absorbed, as it does to-day, almost all the best imaginative energy of English or foreign writers. Now we hear of “art” on every side, and every novelist must give the world his opinion about schools and methods. Scott, on the other hand, lived in the greatest poetical ago since that of Elizabeth. Poetry or the drama (in which, to be sure, few succeeded) occupied Wordsworth, Byron, Coleridge, Shelley, Crabbe, Campbell, and Keats. Then, as Joanna Baillie hyperbolically declared, “The Scotch novels put poetry out of fashion.” ¹⁰

      Till they appeared, novels seem to have been left to readers like the plaintive lady’s-maid whom Scott met at Dalkeith, when he beheld “the fair one descend from the carriage with three half-bound volumes of a novel in her hand.” Mr. Morritt, writing to Scott in March, 1815, hopes he will “restore pure narrative to the dignity from which it gradually slipped before it dwindied into a manufactory for the circulating library.” “Waverley,” he asserted, “would prevail over people otherwise averse to blue-backed volumes.” Thus it was an unconsidered art which Scott took up and revived. Half a century had passed since Fielding gave us in “Tom Jones “ his own and very different picture of life in the “‘forty-five,” — of life with all the romance of the “Race to Derby” cut down to a sentence or two. Since the age of the great English novelists, Richardson and Fielding and Miss Burney, the art of fiction had been spasmodically alive in the hands of Mrs. Radcliffe, had been sentimental with Henry Mackenzie, and now was all but moribund, save for the humorous Irish sketches of Miss Edgeworth. As Scott always insisted, it was mainly “the extended and well-merited fame of Miss Edgeworth” which induced him to try his hand on a novel containing pictures of Scottish life and character. Nothing was more remarkable in his own novels than the blending of close and humorous observation of common life with pleasure in adventurous narratives about “what is not so, and was not so, and Heaven forbid that it ever should be so,” as the girl says in the nursery tale. Through his whole life he remained the dreamer of dreams and teller of wild legends, who had held the lads of the High School entranced round Luckie Brown’s fireside, and had fleeted the summer days in interchange of romances with a schoolboy friend, Mr. Irving, among the hills that girdle Edinburgh. He ever had a passion for “knights and ladies and dragons and giants,” and “God only knows,” he says, “how delighted I was to find myself in such society.” But with all this delight, his imagination had other pleasures than the fantastic: the humours and passions of ordinary existence were as clearly visible to him as the battles, the castles, and the giants. True, he was more fastidious in his choice of novels of real life than in his romantic reading. “The whole Jemmy and Jessamy tribe I abhorred,” he said; “and it required the art of Burney or the feeling of Mackenzie to fix my attention upon a domestic tale.” But when the domestic tale was good and true, no man appreciated it more than he. None has more vigorously applauded Miss Austen than Scott, and it was thus that as the “Author of Waverley’” he addressed Miss Edgeworth, through James Ballantyne: “If I could but hit it Miss Edgeworth’s wonderful power of vivifying all her persons, and making there live as beings in your mind, I should not be afraid.” “Often,” Ballantyne goes on, “has the Author of ‘Waverley’ used such language to me; and I knew that I gratified him most when I could say, ‘Positively, this is equal to Miss Edgeworth.’

      Thus Scott’s own taste was catholic: and in this he was particularly unlike the modern novelists, who proclaim, from both sides of the Atlantic, that only in their own methods, and in sharing their own exclusive tastes, is literary salvation. The prince of Romance was no one-sided romanticiste; his ear was open to all fiction good in its kind. His generosity made him think Miss Edgeworth’s persons more alive than his own. To his own romances he preferred Mrs. Shelley’s “Frankenstein.” ¹¹

      As a critic, of course, he was mistaken; but his was the generous error of the heart, and it is the heart in Walter Scott, even more than the brain, that lends its own vitality to his creations. Equipped as he was with a taste truly catholic, capable in old age of admiring “Pelham,” he had the power to do what he calls “the big bow-wow strain;” yet he was not, as in his modesty he supposed, denied “the exquisite torch which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting, from the truth of the description and the sentiment.”

      The letter of Rose Bradwardine to Waverley is alone enough to disprove Scott’s disparagement of himself, his belief that he had been denied exquisiteness of touch. Nothing human is more delicate, nothing should be more delicately handled, than the first love of a girl. What the “analytical” modern novelist would pass over and dissect and place