The Crown of Wild Olive
composition being not more than a couple of months out of each year; and
during that time only the morning hours and spare minutes during the
professional day. 'Though the first volume of _Waverley_ was begun long
ago, and actually lost for a time, yet the other two were begun and
finished between the 4th of June and the first of July, during all which
I attended my duty in court, and proceeded without loss of time or
hindrance of business.'[165]
Few of the maxims for the enforcement of which, in _Modern Painters_,
long ago, I got the general character of a lover of paradox, are more
singular, or more sure, than the statement, apparently so encouraging to
the idle, that if a great thing can be done at all, it can be done
easily. But it is in that kind of ease with which a tree blossoms after
long years of gathered strength, and all Scott's great writings were the
recreations of a mind confirmed in dutiful labour, and rich with organic
gathering of boundless resource.
Omitting from our count the two minor and ill-finished sketches of the
_Black Dwarf_ and _Legend of Montrose_, and, for a reason presently to
be noticed, the unhappy _St. Ronan's_, the memorable romances of Scott
are eighteen, falling into three distinct groups, containing six each.
The first group is distinguished from the other two by characters of
strength and felicity which never more appeared after Scott was struck
down by his terrific illness in 1819. It includes _Waverley_, _Guy
Mannering_, _The Antiquary_, _Rob Roy_, _Old Mortality_, and _The Heart
of Midlothian_.
The composition of these occupied the mornings of his happiest days,
between the ages of 43 and 48. On the 8th of April, 1819 (he was 48 on
the preceding 15th of August) he began for the first time to
dictate--being unable for the exertion of writing--_The Bride of
Lammermuir_, 'the affectionate Laidlaw beseeching him to stop dictating,
when his audible suffering filled every pause. "Nay, Willie," he
answered "only see that the doors are fast. I would fain keep all the
cry as well as all the wool to ourselves; but as for giving over work,
that can only be when I am in woollen."'[166] From this time forward the
brightness of joy and sincerity of inevitable humour, which perfected
the imagery of the earlier novels, are wholly absent, except in the two
short intervals of health unaccountably restored, in which he wrote
_Redgauntlet_ and _Nigel_.
It is strange, but only a part of the general simplicity of Scott's
genius, that these revivals of earlier power were unconscious, and that
the time of extreme weakness in which he wrote _St. Ronan's Well_, was
that in which he first asserted his own restoration.
It is also a deeply interesting characteristic of his noble nature that
he never gains anything by sickness; the whole man breathes or faints
as one creature; the ache that stiffens a limb chills his heart, and
every pang of the stomach paralyses the brain. It is not so with
inferior minds, in the workings of which it is often impossible to
distinguish native from narcotic fancy, and throbs of conscience from
those of indigestion. Whether in exaltation or languor, the colours of
mind are always morbid, which gleam on the sea for the 'Ancient
Mariner,' and through the casements on 'St. Agnes' Eve;' but Scott is at
once blinded and stultified by sickness; never has a fit of the cramp
without spoiling a chapter, and is perhaps the only author of vivid
imagination who never wrote a foolish word but when he was ill.
It remains only to be noticed on this point that any strong natural
excitement, affecting the deeper springs of his heart, would at once
restore his intellectual powers in all their fullness, and that, far
towards their sunset: but that the strong will on which he prided
himself, though it could trample upon pain, silence grief, and compel
industry, never could warm his imagination, or clear the judgment in his
darker hours.
I believe that this power of the heart over the intellect is common to
all great men: but what the special character of emotion was, that alone
could lift Scott above the power of death, I am about to ask the reader,
in a little while, to observe with joyful care.
The first series of romances then, above named, are all that exhibit the
emphasis of his unharmed faculties. The second group, composed in the
three years subsequent to illness all but mortal, bear every one of them
more or less the seal of it.
They consist of the _Bride of Lammermuir_, _Ivanhoe_, the _Monastery_,
the _Abbot_, _Kenilworth_, and the _Pirate_.[167] The marks of broken
health on all these are essentially twofold--prevailing melancholy, and
fantastic improbability. Three of the tales are agonizingly tragic, the
_Abbot_ scarcely less so in its main event, and _Ivanhoe_ deeply wounded
through all its bright panoply; while even in that most powerful of the
series, the impossible archeries and axestrokes, the incredibly
opportune appearances of Locksley, the death of Ulrica, and the
resuscitation of Athelstane, are partly boyish, partly feverish. Caleb
in the _Bride_, Triptolemus and Halcro in the _Pirate_, are all
laborious, and the first incongruous; half a volume of the _Abbot_ is
spent in extremely dull detail of Roland's relations with his
fellow-servants and his mistress, which have nothing whatever to do with
the future story; and the lady of Avenel herself disappears after the
first volume, 'like a snaw wreath when it's thaw, Jeanie.' The public
has for itself pronounced on the _Monastery_, though as much too harshly
as it has foolishly praised the horrors of _Ravenswood_ and the nonsense
of _Ivanhoe_; because the modern public finds in the torture and
adventure of these, the kind of excitement which it seeks at an opera,
while it has no sympathy whatever with the pastoral happiness of
Glendearg, or with the lingering simplicities of superstition which give
historical likelihood to the legend of the White Lady.
But both this despised tale and its sequel have Scott's heart in them.
The first was begun to refresh himself in the intervals of artificial
labour on _Ivanhoe_. 'It was a relief,' he said, 'to interlay the
scenery most familiar to me[168] with the strange world for which I had
to draw so much on imagination.'[169] Through all the closing scenes of
the second he is raised to his own true level by his love for the
queen. And within the code of Scott's work to which I am about to appeal
for illustration of his essential powers, I accept the _Monastery_ and
_Abbot_, and reject from it the remaining four of this group.
The last series contains two quite noble ones, _Redgauntlet_ and
_Nigel_; two of very high value, _Durward_ and _Woodstock_; the slovenly
and diffuse _Peveril_, written for the trade; the sickly _Tales of the
Crusaders_, and the entirely broken and diseased _St. Ronan's Well_.
This last I throw out of count altogether, and of the rest, accept only
the four first named as sound work; so that the list of the novels in
which I propose to examine his methods and ideal standards, reduces
itself to these following twelve (named in order of production):
_Waverley_, _Guy Mannering_, the _Antiquary_, _Rob Roy_, _Old
Mortality_, the _Heart of Midlothian_, the _Monastery_, the _Abbot_, the
_Fortunes of Nigel_, _Quentin Durward_, and _Woodstock_.[170]
It is, however, too late to enter on my subject in this article, which I
may fitly close by pointing out some of the merely verbal
characteristics of his style, illustrative in little ways of the
questions we have been examining, and chiefly of the one which may be
most embarrassing to many readers, the difference, namely, between
character and disease.
One quite distinctive charm in the Waverleys is their modified use of
the Scottish dialect; but it has not generally been observed, either by
their imitators, or the authors of different taste who have written for
a later public, that there is a difference between the dialect of a
language, and its corruption.
A dialect is formed in any district where there are persons of
intelligence enough to use the language itself in all its fineness and
force, but under the particular conditions of life, climate, and temper,
which introduce words peculiar to the scenery, forms of word and idioms
of sentence peculiar to the race, and pronunciations indicative of their
character and disposition.
Thus 'burn' (of a streamlet) is a word possible only in a country where
there are brightly running waters, 'lassie,' a word possible only where
girls are as free as the rivulets, and 'auld,' a form of the southern
'old,' adopted by a race of finer musical ear than the English.
On the contrary, mere deteriorations, or coarse, stridulent, and, in the
ordinary sense of the phrase, 'broad' forms of utterance, are not
dialects at all, having nothing dialectic in them, and all phrases
developed in states of rude employment, and restricted intercourse, are
injurious to the tone and narrowing to the power of the language they
affect. Mere breadth of accent does not spoil a dialect as long as the
speakers are men of varied idea and good intelligence; but the moment
the life is contracted by mining, millwork, or any oppressive and
monotonous labour, the accents and phrases become debased. It is part of
the popular folly of the day to find pleasure in trying to write and
spell these abortive, crippled, and more or less brutal forms of human
speech.
Abortive, crippled, or brutal, are however not necessarily 'corrupted'
dialects. Corrupt language is that gathered by ignorance, invented by
vice, misused by insensibility, or minced and mouthed by affectation,
especially in the attempt to deal with words of which only half the
meaning is understood, or half the sound heard. Mrs. Gamp's 'aperiently
so'--and the 'undermined' with primal sense of undermine, of--I forget
which gossip, in the _Mill on the Floss_, are master- and
mistress-pieces in this latter kind. Mrs. Malaprop's 'allegories on the
banks of the Nile' are in a somewhat higher order of mistake: Miss
Tabitha Bramble's ignorance is vulgarised by her selfishness, and
Winifred Jenkins' by her conceit. The 'wot' of Noah Claypole, and the
other degradations of cockneyism (Sam Weller and his father are in
nothing more admirable than in the power of heart and sense that can
purify even these); the 'trewth' of Mr. Chadband, and 'natur' of Mr.
Squeers, are examples of the corruption of words by insensibility: the
use of the word 'bloody' in modern low English is a deeper corruption,
not altering the form of the word, but defiling the thought in it.
Thus much being understood, I shall proceed to examine thoroughly a
fragment of Scott's Lowland Scottish dialect; not choosing it of the
most beautiful kind; on the contrary, it shall be a piece reaching as
low down as he ever allows Scotch to go--it is perhaps the only unfair
patriotism in him, that if ever he wants a word or two of really
villainous slang, he gives it in English or Dutch--not Scotch.
I had intended in the close of this paper to analyse and compare the
characters of Andrew Fairservice and Richie Moniplies for examples, the
former of innate evil, unaffected by external influences, and
undiseased, but distinct from natural goodness as a nettle is distinct
from balm or lavender; and the latter of innate goodness, contracted and
pinched by circumstance, but still undiseased, as an oak-leaf crisped by
frost, not by the worm. This, with much else in my mind, I must put off;
but the careful study of one sentence of Andrew's will give us a good
deal to think of.
I take his account of the rescue of Glasgow Cathedral at the time of the
Reformation.
Ah! it's a brave kirk--nane o' yere whigmaleeries and