own estimate of his literary value. Year by year the world has been coming round to his way of thinking, and those who go to gaze now on the bright landscape that he created on Tweed can join with him in his profound estimate of the tasks he did-"My oaks will outlast my laurels." . . . His long poems are uninspired . . . and people, after a hundred years, have admitted the truth of his opinion that what he called his "big bow-wow" method of writing prose was apt to become intolerable.' I do not think that Sir Walter, with all his modesty, ever said anything like 'intolerable.' Mr Stalker is probably thinking of the passage in the 'Journal' (March 14, 1826), in which Scott praises 'Pride and Prejudice' so highly-' That young lady has a talent for describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life, which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with. The big Bow-wow strain I can do myself like any now going; but the exquisite touch . . is denied to me.' The words 'big Bow-wow strain' may occur elsewhere in Scott's letters, etc., but I cannot lay my hands on them. ... 'There was nothing romantic about Scott except his iron will, his passion for planting, and his healthy story-telling life.' t 'His life and personality were much more interesting than the writings that fascinated Europe in his day.' ‡ 'It is not as an intellectual nor an artistic force that Sir Walter appeals to this generation. . . . There is in his verse no more than in Byron's, or Southey's; it is not the real thing. As a novelist he is outshone by two men now living, or by more.' § 'Those broken-winded metres.' || 'It is just because there was in Scott no spiritual impulse that the main themes of his novels and poems are never successful as artistic efforts.' And then, forgetting their long and affectionate friendship, forgetting Wordsworth's adoration of the novels, and also his habitual depreciation of all his poetical contemporaries, Mr Stalker picks up one of Wordsworth's far from rare snarls, As a poet Scott cannot live, for he has never in verse written anything † P. 36. § P. 77. || P. 166. * P. 1. P. 63. addressed to the immortal part of man.' (Alas! we know that W. W. thought that no poet but himself had done so; and, in our estimation, he was so much the greatest of English poets that perhaps he was right.) Now the man who writes all this depreciatory stuff suddenly astonishes us by telling us that: 'The characteristic and vital quality of an artist, the fire within him that illumines his own generation, are too easily forgotten when fifty or a hundred years have brought his work into the cold gallery of the immortals. But we who admire Scott will never let the appraisers of fame forget that all literature was dull before him, and he made it interesting' (follows the tirade quoted above from p. 2). And then for the first time since Shakespeare arose a man with joyful power in the description of his fellow creatures. . . . He evoked the characteristics of Scotland, physical and national; he created magnificent pictures of old time like "Ivanhoe," the imperishable romance. . . . He changed the spirit of British History; he gave a revelation of Scottish character that has stood the test of a hundred years and is still fresh and true' (pp. 163-4). This noble and true praise, and this comparison with Shakespeare, are diluted by the author's dictum that Scott, like Shakespeare, 'succeeded best with his minor characters.' And we, in all seriousness, ask him whether Lear is not the hero of King Lear,' Othello of Othello,' Macbeth and Lady Macbeth the hero and heroine of 'Macbeth,' as much as Falstaff and Hotspur are of 'Henry IV'? Who thinks of Touchstone or Rosalind as 'minor characters'? And is not the Baron the true hero of 'Waverley' as is the Antiquary of 'The Antiquary,' Dalgetty of The Legend,' Wandering Willie and Peter Peebles of Redgauntlet,' Di Vernon of 'Rob Roy'? It seems to us that Mr Stalker cannot have it both ways— Sir Walter cannot both be artist and no artist, cannot both have nothing romantic about him,' and be the creator of 'imperishable romance.' What, then, is Romance? The New English Dictionary has several definitions of the word, e.g. A tale in verse, embodying the adventure of some hero of chivalry, also, later, a prose tale of a similar character': A fictitious narrative in prose, of which the scene and incidents are very remote from those of ordinary life': 'An extravagant fiction, invention or story.' It is in this latter sense that Macaulay uses the word. Milton ('dull fellow') thought of 'What resounds In Fable or Romance of Uther's Son :' which gives us a better idea of the meaning of the word. But to all these we prefer that given by Mr Kipling in the invocatory ode (if ode be the right word) which is prefixed to his 'Many Inventions': it is something impalpable 'whose garments' hem we may touch only in dreams'; it is the 'regent of spheres that lock our fears and hopes'; 'who holds by it has Heaven in fee to gild his dross,' and 'to possess in loneliness the joy of all the earth.' To quote yet another modern Romantic,' Olive Schreiner,' to him the ideal shall be real.' After all, to whom could we go better for an explanation than to Scott himself (not, however, when he was beguiled into thinking that Abbotsford was a sort of romance in Architecture') ? 'My own enthusiasm was chiefly awakened by the wonderful and the terrible-the common taste of children, but in which I have remained a child even unto this day.' 'I was born a Scotchman and a bare one, and was therefore born to fight my way with my left hand where my right failed me, and with my teeth if they were both cut off.' † 'I do not compare myself in point of imagination with Wordsworth-far from it; for his is naturally exquisite and highly cultivated from constant exercise. But I can see as many castles in the clouds as any man. My life has been spent in such day-dreams. But I cry no roast meat. There are times a man should remember what Rousseau used to say, "Tais-toi, Jean-Jacques, car on ne t'entend pas."' + The fact that Scott cried his own wares so little, and so constantly spoke of them as unimportant in comparison with action and Life with a big L, does not justify Mr Stalker in snarling that 'he would rather have been Duke of Buccleuch or Duke of Blankshire than Shakespeare,' § in openly suggesting that he was * Autobiography, Lockhart, chap. i, p. 8. To Morritt, 1810, Lockhart, chap. xx, p. 191. an appalling snob and sycophant, in speaking of his 'nauseating servility to the Duke of Wellington' (whom he regarded as the Saviour of Europe after a nightmare of twenty-two years), or in hinting, throughout his sixteenth chapter, that even his political opinions were adopted in order to curry favour with Dukes and Tories. But to continue : 'The love of solitude was with me a passion of early youth: when in my teens I used to fly from company to indulge in visions and airy castles of my own.'" 'While Tom [Purdie] marks out a drain or a dyke as I have directed, one's fancy may be running its ain riggs in some other world.' † And then let us hear his interpreter, Lockhart: 'His delight and pride was to play with the genius which nevertheless mastered him at will. For, in truth, what is it that gives to all his works their unique and marking charm except the matchless effect which sudden effusions of the purest heart's blood of nature derive from their being poured out to all appearance involuntarily? . . . In the interludes and passionate parentheses of "The Lay" we have the poet's own inner soul laid bare and throbbing before us.' ‡ Of 'Waverley,' says Lockhart: 'Loftier Romance was never blended with easier quainter humour by Cervantes himself; he had combined the strength of Smollett' [too dull a fellow, one supposes, for Mr Stalker even to mention in his New Dunciad] with the native elegance and unaffected pathos of Goldsmith: in his darker scenes he had revived that real tragedy which appeared to have left our stage with the age of Shakespeare.' § Strangely enough, Lockhart's praise of 'Redgauntlet,' greater than Waverley,' and, in our judgment, the greatest of all humour-seasoned romances, is comparatively cold. Most intimate of all perhaps is this: 'We should try to picture for ourselves what the actual intellectual life must have been of the author of such a series of romances. We should ask ourselves whether, filling and discharging so soberly and gracefully as he did the common *Journal,' March 28, 1826. Ibid, chap. xiii, p. 120. † Lockhart, chap. xlii, p. 378. § Ibid, chap. xxxiii, p. 302. Ibid, chap. lx, p. 514. functions of social man, it was not, nevertheless, impossible but that he must have passed most of his life in other worlds than ours; and we ought hardly to think it a grievous circumstance that their bright visions should have left a dazzle sometimes on the eyes which he so gently reopened upon our prosaic realities. . . . He could not habitually fling them' [the powers of his mind] 'into the region of dreams through a long series of years, and yet be expected to find a corresponding satisfaction in bending them to the less agreeable considerations' [of this world]. 'He must pay the penalty, as well as reap the glory of this life-long abstraction of reverie, this self-abandonment to Fairyland.' ... This sentence seems to us to sum up victoriously the whole case for the romantic temperament. Will Erskine (Lord Kinneder) tells of Scott's abstraction, on the Northern voyage of 1814, when confronted with the grandeurs of Loch Coruisk, grandeurs which inspired some stanzas almost redemptory of the 'Lord of the Isles.' † Adolphus dwells on the 'surprising power of change which his countenance showed when awakened from a state of composure' . . . of the doubtful, melancholy, exploring, look of the eyes which appealed irresistibly to his hearers' imagination when he told some mysterious story.' Perhaps we have said enough on this subject. Even Lockhart himself, with all that 'sombre poignancy' which Mr Stalker so admirably considers to be his highest gift, hardly gets above the great literary side of his subject, hardly kindles his own heart into flame at the ringing magic of the words and ideas. But it is precisely that power of kindling into flame the hearts of his true lovers, in which Sir Walter excels. And it is as true now as in the day when the soldiers of Torres Vedras watched as eagerly for the arrival of the first copies of 'The Lady' as they did for Masséna to charge up hill.§ * Lockhart, chap. lxiv, p. 576. Ibid, chap. xxviii, p. 258. § 'The men were ordered to lie prostrate on the ground; while they kept that attitude the Captain, kneeling at their head, read aloud the description of the battle in Canto VI, and the listening soldiers only interrupted him by a joyous huzza, whenever the French shot struck the bank close above them' (Lockhart, chap. xxii, p. 207). Mr. Stalker, whose ideal seems to be a trades-unionist agitator, has, no doubt, little use for such men as these. |