A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century. Henry A. Beers

the age of the Crusades. The fortunes of the Stuarts, interested him specially and engaged him in "Woodstock," "The Fortunes of Nigel," "The Monastery," and its sequel, "The Abbot." He seems to have had, in the words of Mr. R. H. Hutton, "something very like personal experience of a few centuries."

      Scott's formula for the construction of a historical romance was original with himself, and it has been followed by all his successors. His story is fictitious, his hero imaginary. Richard I. is not the hero of "Ivanhoe," nor Louis XI. of "Quentin Durward." Shakspere dramatised history; Scott romanticised it. Still it is history, the private story is swept into the stream of large public events, the fate of the lover or the adventurer is involved with battles and diplomacies, with the rise and fall of kings, dynasties, political parties, nations. Stevenson says, comparing Fielding with Scott, that "in the work of the latter … we become suddenly conscious of the background. … It is curious enough to think that 'Tom Jones' is laid in the year '45, and that the only use he makes of the rebellion is to throw a troop of soldiers in his hero's way." [35] And it is this background which is, after all, the important thing in Scott—the leading impression; the broad canvas, the swarm of life, the spirit of the age, the reconstitution of an extinct society. This he was able to give with seeming ease and without any appearance of "cram." Chronicle matter does not lie about in lumps on the surface of his romance, but is decently buried away in the notes. In his comments on "Queenhoo Hall" he adverts to the danger of a pedantic method, and in his "Journal" (October 18th, 1826) he writes as follows of his own numerous imitators: "They have to read old books and consult antiquarian collections, to get their knowledge. I write because I have long since read such works and possess, thanks to a strong memory, the information which they have to seek for. This leads to a dragging in historical details by head and shoulders, so that the interest of the main piece is lost in minute description of events which do not affect its progress."

      Of late the recrudescence of the historical novel has revived the discussion as to the value of the genre. It may be readily admitted that Scott's best work is realistic, and is to be looked for in such novels as "The Antiquary," "Old Mortality," "The Heart of Mid-Lothian," and in characters like Andrew Fairservice, Bailie Nicol Jarvie, Dandie Dinmont, Dugald Dalgetty, Jeanie Deans, Edie Ochiltrie, which brought into play his knowledge of men, his humour, observation of life, and insight into Scotch human nature. Scott knew these people; he had to divine James I., Louis XI., and Mary Stuart. The historical novel is a tour de force. Exactly how knights-templars, burgomasters, friars, Saracens, and Robin Hood archers talked and acted in the twelfth century, we cannot know. But it is just because they are strange to our experience that they are dear to our imagination. The justification of romance is its unfamiliarity—"strangeness added to beauty"—"the pleasure of surprise" as distinguished from "the pleasure of recognition." Again and again realism returns to the charge and demands of art that it give us the present and the actual; and again and again the imagination eludes the demand and makes an ideal world for itself in the blue distance.

      Two favourite arts, or artifices, of all romantic schools, are "local colour" and "the picturesque." "Vers l'an de grâce 1827," writes Prosper Mérimée, "j'étais romantique. Nous disions aux classiques; vos Grecs ne sont pas des Grecs, vos Romains ne sont pas des Romains; vous ne savez pas donner à vos compositions la couleur locale. Point de salut sans la couleur locale." [36]

      As to the picturesque—a word that connotes, in its critical uses, some quality in the objects of sense which strikes us as at once novel, and characteristic in its novelty—while by no means the highest of literary arts, it is a perfectly legitimate one.[37] Creçy is not, at bottom, a more interesting battle than Gettysburg because it was fought with bows and arrows, but it is more picturesque to the modern imagination just for that reason. Why else do the idiots in "MacArthur's Hymn" complain that "steam spoils romance at sea"? Why did Ruskin lament when the little square at the foot of Giotto's Tower in Florence was made a stand for hackney coaches? Why did our countryman Halleck at Alnwick Towers resent the fact that "the Percy deals in salt and hides, the Douglas sells red herring"? And why does the picturesque tourist, in general, object to the substitution of naphtha launches for gondolas on the Venetian canals? Perhaps because the more machinery is interposed between man and the thing he works on, the more impersonal becomes his relation to nature.

      Carlyle, in his somewhat grudging estimate of Scott, declares that "much of the interest of these novels results from contrasts of costume. The phraseology, fashion of arms, of dress, of life belonging to one age is brought suddenly with singular vividness before the eyes of another. A great effect this; yet by the very nature of it an altogether temporary one. Consider, brethren, shall not we too one day be antiques and grow to have as quaint a costume as the rest? … Not by slashed breeches, steeple hats, buff belts, or antiquated speech can romance-heroes continue to interest us; but simply and solely, in the long run, by being men. Buff belts and all manner of jerkins and costumes are transitory; man alone is perennial." [38] Carlyle's dissatisfaction with Scott arises from the fact that he was not a missionary nor a transcendental philosopher, but simply a teller of stories. Heine was not troubled in the same way, but he made the identical criticism, "Like the works of Walter Scott, so also do Fouqué's romances of chivalry[40] remind us of the fantastic tapestries known as Gobelins, whose rich texture and brilliant colors are more pleasing to our eyes than edifying to our souls. We behold knightly pageantry, shepherds engaged in festive sports, hand-to-hand combats, and ancient customs, charmingly intermingled. It is all very pretty and picturesque, but shallow; brilliant superficiality. Among the imitators of Fouqué, as among the imitators of Walter Scott, this mannerism of portraying—not the inner nature of men and things, but merely the outward garb and appearance—was carried to still greater extremes. This shallow art and frivolous style is still [1833] in vogue in Germany as well as in England and France. … In lieu of a knowledge of mankind, our recent novelists evince a profound acquaintance with clothes." [39]

      Elsewhere Heine acknowledges a deeper reason for the popularity of the Scotch novels. "Their theme … is the mighty sorrow for the loss of national peculiarities swallowed up in the universality of the newer culture—a sorrow which is now throbbing in the hearts of all peoples. For national memories lie deeper in the human breast than is generally thought." But whatever rank may be ultimately assigned to the historical novel as an art form, Continental critics are at one with the British in crediting its invention to Scott. "It is an error," says Heine, "not to recognise Walter Scott as the founder of the so-called historical romance, and to endeavour to trace it to German imitation." He adds that Scott was a Protestant, a lawyer and a Scotchman, accustomed to action and debate, in whose works the aristocratic and democratic elements are in wholesome balance; "whereas our German romanticists eliminated the democratic element entirely from their novels, and returned to the ruts of those crazy romances of knight-errantry that flourished before Cervantes." [41] "Quel est Fouvrage littéraire," asks Stendhal in 1823,[42] "qui a le plus réussi en France depuis dix ans? Les romans de Walter Scott. … On s'est moqué à Paris pendant vingt ans du roman historique; l'Académie a prouvé doctement le ridicule de ce genre; nous y croyions tous, lorsque Walter Scott a paru, son Waverley à la main; et Balantyne, son libraire vient de mourir millionaire." [43]

      Lastly the service of the Waverley Novels to history was an important one. Palgrave says that historical fiction is the mortal enemy of history, and Leslie Stephen adds that it is also the enemy of fiction. In a sense both sayings are true. Scott was not always accurate as to facts and sinned freely against chronology. But he rescued a wide realm from cold oblivion and gave it back to human consciousness and sympathy. It is treating the past more kindly to misrepresent it in some particulars, than to leave it a blank to the imagination. The eighteenth-century historians were incurious of life. Their spirit was general and abstract; they were in search of philosophical formulas. Gibbon covers his subject with a lava-flood of stately rhetoric which stiffens into a uniform stony coating over the soft surface of life. Scott is primarily responsible for that dramatic, picturesque treatment of history which we find in Michelet and Carlyle. "These historical novels," testifies Carlyle, "have taught all men this truth, which looks like a truism, and yet was as good as unknown to writers of history and others, till so taught; that the bygone ages of the world were actually filled by living men, not by protocols, state papers, controversies, and abstractions of men. … It is a great service, fertile in consequences, this that Scott