The English Novel by George Saintsbury (essential reading TXT) 📖

1895.

But with their varying degrees of talent--with, in one or two cases, even a little genius--all these writers had broken themselves upon one fatal difficulty--that of anachronism: not in the petty sense of the pedant, but in the wide one of the critic. The present writer is not prepared, without reading A Peep at Our Ancestors again (which he distinctly declines to do), to say that there are, in that remarkable performance, any positive errors of historic fact worse than, or as bad, as those which pedantry has pointed out in Ivanhoe . But whereas you may be nearly as well acquainted with the actual history of the time as the pedants themselves, and a great deal better acquainted with its literature, and yet never be shocked, disgusted, or contemptuously amused in Ivanhoe by such things as were quoted from the Peep a few pages back--so, to those who know something of "the old Elizabeth way," and even nowadays to those who know very little, and that little at second hand, Miss Lee's travesty of it in The Recess is impossible and intolerable. When Mrs. Radcliffe, at the date definitely given of 1584, talks about "the Parisian opera," represents a French girl of the sixteenth century as being "instructed in the English poets," and talks about driving in a "landau," the individual blunders are, perhaps, not more violent than those of the chronology by which Scott's Ulrica is apparently a girl at the time of the Conquest and a woman, not too old to be the object of rivalry between Front de Boeuf and his father, not long before the reign of Richard I. But this last oversight does not affect the credibility of the story, or the homogeneity of the manners, in the least. Mrs. Radcliffe jumbles up two (or more than two) utterly different states and stages of society, manners, and other things which constitute the very atmosphere of the story itself. Perhaps (we have very few easy conversations of the period to justify a positive statement) a real Bois-Guilbert and still more a real Wamba might not have talked exactly like Scott's personages: but there is no insistent and disturbing reason why they should not. When we hear an Adelaise of the mid-twelfth century asking whether she does not receive her education from her mamma, the necessary "suspension of disbelief" becomes impossible.

But these now most obvious truths were not obvious at all between 1780 and 1810: and it is perhaps the greatest evidence of Scott's genius that half, but by no means quite, unconsciously he saw them, and that he has made everybody see them since. It was undoubtedly fortunate that he began novel-writing so late: for earlier even he might have been caught in the errors of the time. But when he did begin, he had not only reached middle life and matured his considerable original critical faculty--criticism and wine are the only things that even the "kind calm years" may be absolutely trusted to improve if there is any original goodness in them--but he had other advantages. He had read, if not with minute accuracy, very widely indeed: and he possessed, as Lord Morley has well said, "the genius of history" in a degree which perhaps no merely meticulous scholar has ever reached, and which was not exceeded in quality even by the greatest historians such as Gibbon. He had an almost unmatched combination of common sense with poetic imagination, of knowledge of the world with knowledge of letters. He had shown himself to be possessed of the secret of semi-historical narrative itself in half a dozen remarkable verse romances, and therefore had less to do in engineering the prose romance. Last of all, he had seen what to avoid--not merely in his editing of Strutt's Queenhoo Hall (a valuable property-room for the novel, but nothing of a real novel), but in his reading of the failures of his predecessors and contemporaries. The very beginning of Waverley itself (which most people skip) is invaluable, because it shows us that at the time he wrote it (which, it need hardly be said, was a long time before its completion) he had not the knowledge or the courage to strike straight out into the stream of action and conversation, but troubled himself with accumulating bladders and arranging ropes for the possible salvation of his narrative if it got into difficulties. Very soon he knew that it would not get into difficulties: and away he went.

It ought not to be necessary, but from some symptoms it may be desirable, to point out that Scott is very far from being an historical novelist only. An acute French critic, well acquainted with both literatures, once went so far as to say that there were a good many professed "philosophical" novels which did not contain such keen psychology as Scott's: and I would undertake to show a good deal of cause on this side. But short of it, it is undeniable that he can do perfectly well without any historical scaffolding. There is practically nothing of it in his second and third novels, Guy Mannering and The Antiquary , each of which good judges have sometimes ranked as his very best: there is as little or less in St. Ronan's Well , a very fine thing as it is, and one which, but for James Ballantyne's meddling folly and prudery, would have been much finer. The incomparable little conversation--scenes and character-sketches scattered among the Introductions to the novels--especially the history of Crystal Croftangry--show that he could perfectly well have dispensed with all out-of-the-way incident had he chosen. But, as a rule, he did not so choose: and, in the majority of cases, he preferred to take his out-of-the-way incident from historical sources. Not here, unfortunately, can we allow ourselves even a space proportionate to that given above in Miss Austen's case to the criticism of individual novels: but luckily there is not much need of this. The brilliant overture of
Waverley as such, with its entirely novel combination of the historical and the "national" elements upon the still more novel background of Highland scenery; the equally vivid and vigorous narrative and the more interesting personages of Old Mortality and Rob Roy ; the domestic tragedy, with the historical element for little more than a framework, of the Heart of Midlothian and the Bride of Lammermoor ; the little masterpiece of A Legend of Montrose ; the fresh departure, with purely English subject, of Ivanhoe and its triumphant sequels in
Kenilworth, Quentin Durward , and others; the striking utilisation of literary assistance in the Fortunes of Nigel ; and the wonderful blending of autobiographic, historical, and romantic interest in
Redgauntlet :--one cannot dwell on these and other things. The magic continued even in Woodstock --written as this was almost between the blows of the executioner's crow-bar on the wheel, in the tightening of the windlasses at the rack--it is not absent, whatever people may say, in Anne of Geierstein , nor even quite lacking in the better parts of
Count Robert of Paris . But we must not expatiate on its effects; we must only give a little attention to the means by which they are achieved.

Another of the common errors about Scott is to represent--perhaps really to regard--him as a hit-or-miss and hand-to-mouth improvisatore , who bundled out his creations anyhow, and did not himself know how he created them. The fallacy is worse than a fallacy: for it is down-right false witness. We have numerous passages in and out of the novels--the chief of them being the remarkable conversation with Captain Clutterbuck in the Introduction to the Fortunes of Nigel and the reflections in the Diary on Sir John Chiverton and Brambletye House --showing that Scott knew perfectly well the construction and the stringing of his fiddle, as well as the trick of applying his rosin. But if we had not these direct testimonies, no one of any critical faculty could mistake the presence of consciously perceived principles in the books themselves. A man does not suddenly, and by mere blind instinct, avoid such a pitfall as that of incongruous speech and manners, which has been noticed above. It is not mere happy-go-lucky blundering which makes him invariably decline another into which people still fall--the selection of historical personages of the first importance, and elaborately known, for the central figures of his novels. Not to believe in luck is a mark of perhaps greater folly than to over-believe in it: but luck will not always keep a man clear of such perils as that unskilful wedging of great blocks of mere history into his story, which the lesser historical novelists always commit, or that preponderance of mere narrative itself as compared with action and conversation from which even Dumas, even Thackeray, is not free.

That he knew what he was doing and what he had to do is thus certain; that he did it to an astounding extent is still more certain; but it would not skill much to deny that he did not always give himself time to do it perfectly in every respect, though it is perhaps not mere paradox or mere partisanship to suggest that if he had given himself more time, he would hardly have done better, and might have done worse. The accusation of superficiality has been already glanced at: and it is pretty certain that it argues more superficiality, of a much more hopeless kind, in those who make it. The accusation of careless and slovenly style is not much better: for Scott had, perfectly, the style suited to his own work, and you cannot easily have a better style than that. But there are two defects in him which were early detected by good and friendly judges: and which are in fact natural results of the extraordinary force and fertility of his creative power. One--the less serious, but certainly to some extent a fault in art and a point in which he is distinguished for the worse from Shakespeare--is that he is rather given to allow at first, to some of his personages, an elaborateness and apparent emphasis of drawing which seems to promise an importance for them in the story that they never actually attain. Mike Lambourne in Kenilworth is a good example of this: but there are many others. The fact evidently was that, in the rush of the artist's plastic imagination, other figures rose and overpowered these. It is an excuse: but it is hardly a justification. The other and more serious is a tendency--which grew on him and may no doubt have been encouraged by the astonishing pecuniary rewards of his work--to hurry his conclusions, to "huddle up the cards and throw them into the bag," as Lady Louisa Stuart told him. There is one of the numerous, but it would seem generic and classifiable, forms of unpleasant dream in which the dreamer's watch, to his consternation, suddenly begins to send its hands round at double and ten-fold speed. Scott is rather apt to do this, towards the close of his novels, in his eagerness to begin something else. These defects, however, are defects much more from the point of view of abstract criticism than from that of the pleasure of the reader: while, even from the former, they are outweighed many times by merits. And as regards our present method of estimation, they hardly count at all.

For, in that calculus, the important thing is that Scott, like Miss Austen, at once opened an immense new field to the novelist, and showed how that field was to be