The Crown of Wild Olive
watches the execution of his mistress from the tower of Notre-Dame; and
its strength passes gradually away into the anatomical preparations, for
the general market, of novels like _Poor Miss Finch_, in which the
heroine is blind, the hero epileptic, and the obnoxious brother is found
dead with his hands dropped off, in the Arctic regions.[156]
This literature of the Prison-house, understanding by the word not only
the cell of Newgate, but also and even more definitely the cell of the
Hotel-Dieu, the Hopital des Fous, and the grated corridor with the
dripping slabs of the Morgue, having its central root thus in the Ile
de Paris--or historically and pre-eminently the 'Cite de Paris'--is,
when understood deeply, the precise counter-corruption of the religion
of the Sainte Chapelle, just as the worst forms of bodily and mental
ruin are the corruption of love. I have therefore called it 'Fiction
mecroyante,' with literal accuracy and precision; according to the
explanation of the word which the reader may find in any good French
dictionary,[157] and round its Arctic pole in the Morgue, he may gather
into one Caina of gelid putrescence the entire product of modern infidel
imagination, amusing itself with destruction of the body, and busying
itself with aberration of the mind.
Aberration, palsy, or plague, observe, as distinguished from normal
evil, just as the venom of rabies or cholera differs from that of a wasp
or a viper. The life of the insect and serpent deserves, or at least
permits, our thoughts; not so, the stages of agony in the fury-driven
hound. There is some excuse, indeed, for the pathologic labour of the
modern novelist in the fact that he cannot easily, in a city population,
find a healthy mind to vivisect: but the greater part of such amateur
surgery is the struggle, in an epoch of wild literary competition, to
obtain novelty of material. The varieties of aspect and colour in
healthy fruit, be it sweet or sour, may be within certain limits
described exhaustively. Not so the blotches of its conceivable blight:
and while the symmetries of integral human character can only be traced
by harmonious and tender skill, like the branches of a living tree, the
faults and gaps of one gnawed away by corroding accident can be shuffled
into senseless change like the wards of a Chubb lock.
V. It is needless to insist on the vast field for this dice-cast or
card-dealt calamity which opens itself in the ignorance, money-interest,
and mean passion, of city marriage. Peasants know each other as
children--meet, as they grow up in testing labour; and if a stout
farmer's son marries a handless girl, it is his own fault. Also in the
patrician families of the field, the young people know what they are
doing, and marry a neighbouring estate, or a covetable title, with some
conception of the responsibilities they undertake. But even among these,
their season in the confused metropolis creates licentious and
fortuitous temptation before unknown; and in the lower middle orders, an
entirely new kingdom of discomfort and disgrace has been preached to
them in the doctrines of unbridled pleasure which are merely an apology
for their peculiar forms of illbreeding. It is quite curious how often
the catastrophe, or the leading interest, of a modern novel, turns upon
the want, both in maid and bachelor, of the common self-command which
was taught to their grandmothers and grandfathers as the first element
of ordinarily decent behaviour. Rashly inquiring the other day the plot
of a modern story from a female friend, I elicited, after some
hesitation, that it hinged mainly on the young people's 'forgetting
themselves in a boat;' and I perceive it to be accepted as nearly an
axiom in the code of modern civic chivalry that the strength of amiable
sentiment is proved by our incapacity on proper occasions to express,
and on improper ones to control it. The pride of a gentleman of the old
school used to be in his power of saying what he meant, and being silent
when he ought, (not to speak of the higher nobleness which bestowed love
where it was honourable, and reverence where it was due); but the
automatic amours and involuntary proposals of recent romance acknowledge
little further law of morality than the instinct of an insect, or the
effervescence of a chemical mixture.
There is a pretty little story of Alfred de Musset's,--_La Mouche_,
which, if the reader cares to glance at it, will save me further trouble
in explaining the disciplinarian authority of mere old-fashioned
politeness, as in some sort protective of higher things. It describes,
with much grace and precision, a state of society by no means
pre-eminently virtuous, or enthusiastically heroic; in which many people
do extremely wrong, and none sublimely right. But as there are heights
of which the achievement is unattempted, there are abysses to which fall
is barred; neither accident nor temptation will make any of the
principal personages swerve from an adopted resolution, or violate an
accepted principle of honour; people are expected as a matter of course
to speak with propriety on occasion, and to wait with patience when they
are bid: those who do wrong, admit it; those who do right don't boast of
it; everybody knows his own mind, and everybody has good manners.
Nor must it be forgotten that in the worst days of the self-indulgence
which destroyed the aristocracies of Europe, their vices, however
licentious, were never, in the fatal modern sense, 'unprincipled.' The
vainest believed in virtue; the vilest respected it. 'Chaque chose avait
son nom,'[158] and the severest of English moralists recognises the
accurate wit, the lofty intellect, and the unfretted benevolence, which
redeemed from vitiated surroundings the circle of d'Alembert and
Marmontel.[159]
I have said, with too slight praise, that the vainest, in those days,
'believed' in virtue. Beautiful and heroic examples of it were always
before them; nor was it without the secret significance attaching to
what may seem the least accidents in the work of a master, that Scott
gave to both his heroines of the age of revolution in England the name
of the queen of the highest order of English chivalry.[160]
It is to say little for the types of youth and maid which alone Scott
felt it a joy to imagine, or thought it honourable to portray, that they
act and feel in a sphere where they are never for an instant liable to
any of the weaknesses which disturb the calm, or shake the resolution,
of chastity and courage in a modern novel. Scott lived in a country and
time, when, from highest to lowest, but chiefly in that dignified and
nobly severe[161] middle class to which he himself belonged, a habit of
serene and stainless thought was as natural to the people as their
mountain air. Women like Rose Bradwardine and Ailie Dinmont were the
grace and guard of almost every household (God be praised that the race
of them is not yet extinct, for all that Mall or Boulevard can do), and
it has perhaps escaped the notice of even attentive readers that the
comparatively uninteresting character of Sir Walter's heroes had always
been studied among a class of youths who were simply incapable of doing
anything seriously wrong; and could only be embarrassed by the
consequences of their levity or imprudence.
But there is another difference in the woof of a Waverley novel from the
cobweb of a modern one, which depends on Scott's larger view of human
life. Marriage is by no means, in his conception of man and woman, the
most important business of their existence;[162] nor love the only
reward to be proposed to their virtue or exertion. It is not in his
reading of the laws of Providence a necessity that virtue should, either
by love or any other external blessing, be rewarded at all;[163] and
marriage is in all cases thought of as a constituent of the happiness of
life, but not as its only interest, still less its only aim. And upon
analysing with some care the motives of his principal stories, we shall
often find that the love in them is merely a light by which the sterner
features of character are to be irradiated, and that the marriage of the
hero is as subordinate to the main bent of the story as Henry the
Fifth's courtship of Katherine is to the battle of Agincourt. Nay, the
fortunes of the person who is nominally the subject of the tale are
often little more than a background on which grander figures are to be
drawn, and deeper fates forth-shadowed. The judgments between the faith
and chivalry of Scotland at Drumclog and Bothwell bridge owe little of
their interest in the mind of a sensible reader to the fact that the
captain of the Popinjay is carried a prisoner to one battle, and returns
a prisoner from the other: and Scott himself, while he watches the white
sail that bears Queen Mary for the last time from her native land, very
nearly forgets to finish his novel, or to tell us--and with small sense
of any consolation to be had out of that minor circumstance,--that
'Roland and Catherine were united, spite of their differing faiths.'
Neither let it be thought for an instant that the slight, and sometimes
scornful, glance with which Scott passes over scenes which a novelist of
our own day would have analysed with the airs of a philosopher, and
painted with the curiosity of a gossip, indicate any absence in his
heart of sympathy with the great and sacred elements of personal
happiness. An era like ours, which has with diligence and ostentation
swept its heart clear of all the passions once known as loyalty,
patriotism, and piety, necessarily magnifies the apparent force of the
one remaining sentiment which sighs through the barren chambers, or
clings inextricably round the chasms of ruin; nor can it but regard with
awe the unconquerable spirit which still tempts or betrays the
sagacities of selfishness into error or frenzy which is believed to be
love.
That Scott was never himself, in the sense of the phrase as employed by
lovers of the Parisian school, 'ivre d'amour,' may be admitted without
prejudice to his sensibility,[164] and that he never knew 'l'amor che
move 'l sol e l'altre stelle,' was the chief, though unrecognised,
calamity of his deeply chequered life. But the reader of honour and
feeling will not therefore suppose that the love which Miss Vernon
sacrifices, stooping for an instant from her horse, is of less noble
stamp, or less enduring faith, than that which troubles and degrades
the whole existence of Consuelo; or that the affection of Jeanie Deans
for the companion of her childhood, drawn like a field of soft blue
heaven beyond the cloudy wrack of her sorrow, is less fully in
possession of her soul than the hesitating and self-reproachful impulses
under which a modern heroine forgets herself in a boat, or compromises
herself in the cool of the evening.
I do not wish to return over the waste ground we have traversed,
comparing, point by point, Scott's manner with those of Bermondsey and
the Faubourgs; but it may be, perhaps, interesting at this moment to
examine, with illustration from those Waverley novels which have so
lately _re_tracted the attention of a fair and gentle public, the
universal conditions of 'style,' rightly so called, which are in all
ages, and above all local currents or wavering tides of temporary
manners, pillars of what is for ever strong, and models of what is for
ever fair.
But I must first define, and that within strict horizon, the works of
Scott, in which his perfect mind may be known, and his chosen ways
understood.
His great works of prose fiction, excepting only the first half-volume
of _Waverley_, were all written in twelve years, 1814-26 (of his own age
forty-three to fifty-five), the actual time employed in their