Waverley

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 Miss Edgeworth’s wonderful power of vivifying all her persons, and making them 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.6 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 touch which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting, from the truth of the description and the sentiment.”7

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 beneath his microscope till a student of any manliness blushes with shame and annoyance, Scott suffers Rose Bradwardine to reveal with a sensitive shyness. But Scott, of course, had even less in common with the peeper and botanizer on maidens’ hearts than with the wildest romanticist. He considered that “a want of story is always fatal to a book the first reading, and it is well if it gets a chance of a second.” From him Pride and Prejudice got a chance of three readings at least. This generous universality of taste, in addition to all his other qualities of humour and poetry, enabled Scott to raise the novel from its decadence, and to make the dry bones of history live again in his tales. With Charles Edward at Holyrood, as Mr. Senior wrote in the Quarterly Review, “we are in the lofty region of romance. In any other hands than those of Sir Walter Scott, the language and conduct of those great people would have been as dignified as their situations. We should have heard nothing of the hero in his new costume ‘majoring afore the muckle pier-glass,’ of his arrest by the host of the Candlestick, of his examination by the well-powdered Major Melville, or of his fears of being informed against by Mrs. Nosebag.” In short, “while the leading persons and events are as remote from ordinary life as the inventions of Scudéry, the picture of human nature is as faithful as could have been given by Fielding or Le Sage.” Though this criticism has not the advantage of being new, it is true; and when we have added that Scott’s novels are the novels of the poet who, next to Shakespeare, knew mankind most widely and well, we have the secret of his triumph.

For the first time in literature, it was a poet who held the pen of the romancer in prose. Fielding, Richardson, De Foe, Miss Burney, were none of them made by the gods poetical. Scott himself, with his habitual generosity, would have hailed his own predecessor in Mrs. Radcliffe. “The praise may be claimed for Mrs. Radcliffe of having been the first to introduce into her prose fictions a beautiful and fanciful tone of natural description and impressive narrative, which had hitherto been exclusively applied to poetry.⁠ ⁠… Mrs. Radcliffe has a title to be considered the first poetess of romantic fiction.” When Guy Mannering appeared, Wordsworth sneered at it as a work of the Radcliffe school. The slight difference produced by the introduction of humour could scarcely be visible to Wordsworth. But Scott would not have been hurt by his judgment. He had the literary courage to recognize merit even when obscured by extravagance, and to applaud that in which people of culture could find neither excellence nor charm. Like Thackeray, he had been thrilled by Vivaidi in the Inquisition, and he was not the man to hide his gratitude because his author was now out of fashion.

Thus we see that Scott, when he began Waverley in