by John Ruskin
FICTION--FAIR AND FOUL.
On the first mild--or, at least, the first bright--day of March, in thisyear, I walked through what was once a country lane, between thehostelry of the Half-moon at the bottom of Herne Hill, and the secludedCollege of Dulwich.
In my young days, Croxsted Lane was a green bye-road traversable forsome distance by carts; but rarely so traversed, and, for the most part,little else than a narrow strip of untilled field, separated byblackberry hedges from the better cared-for meadows on each side of it:growing more weeds, therefore, than they, and perhaps in spring aprimrose or two--white archangel--daisies plenty, and purple thistles inautumn. A slender rivulet, boasting little of its brightness, for thereare no springs at Dulwich, yet fed purely enough by the rain and morningdew, here trickled--there loitered--through the long grass beneath thehedges, and expanded itself, where it might, into moderately clear anddeep pools, in which, under their veils of duck-weed, a fresh-watershell or two, sundry curious little skipping shrimps, any quantity oftadpoles in their time, and even sometimes a tittlebat, offeredthemselves to my boyhood's pleased, and not inaccurate, observation.There, my mother and I used to gather the first buds of the hawthorn;and there, in after years, I used to walk in the summer shadows, as in aplace wilder and sweeter than our garden, to think over any passage Iwanted to make better than usual in _Modern Painters_.
So, as aforesaid, on the first kindly day of this year, being thoughtfulmore than usual of those old times, I went to look again at the place.
Often, both in those days, and since, I have put myself hard to it,vainly, to find words wherewith to tell of beautiful things; but beautyhas been in the world since the world was made, and human language canmake a shift, somehow, to give account of it, whereas the peculiarforces of devastation induced by modern city life have only entered theworld lately; and no existing terms of language known to me are enoughto describe the forms of filth, and modes of ruin, that variedthemselves along the course of Croxsted Lane. The fields on each side ofit are now mostly dug up for building, or cut through into gaunt cornersand nooks of blind ground by the wild crossings and concurrencies ofthree railroads. Half a dozen handfuls of new cottages, with Doricdoors, are dropped about here and there among the gashed ground: thelane itself, now entirely grassless, is a deep-rutted, heavy-hillockedcart-road, diverging gatelessly into various brick-fields or pieces ofwaste; and bordered on each side by heaps of--Hades only knowswhat!--mixed dust of every unclean thing that can crumble in drought,and mildew of every unclean thing that can rot or rust in damp: ashesand rags, beer-bottles and old shoes, battered pans, smashed crockery,shreds of nameless clothes, door-sweepings, floor-sweepings, kitchengarbage, back-garden sewage, old iron, rotten timber jagged without-torn nails, cigar-ends, pipe-bowls, cinders, bones, and ordure,indescribable; and, variously kneaded into, sticking to, or flutteringfoully here and there over all these,--remnants broadcast, of everymanner of newspaper, advertisement or big-lettered bill, festering andflaunting out their last publicity in the pits of stinking dust andmortal slime.
The lane ends now where its prettiest windings once began; being cut offby a cross-road leading out of Dulwich to a minor railway station: andon the other side of this road, what was of old the daintiest intricacyof its solitude is changed into a straight, and evenly macadamisedcarriage drive, between new houses of extreme respectability, with goodattached gardens and offices--most of these tenements being larger--allmore pretentious, and many, I imagine, held at greatly higher rent thanmy father's, tenanted for twenty years at Herne Hill. And it becamematter of curious meditation to me what must here become of childrenresembling my poor little dreamy quondam self in temper, and thusbrought up at the same distance from London, and in the same or bettercircumstances of worldly fortune; but with only Croxsted Lane in itspresent condition for their country walk. The trimly kept road beforetheir doors, such as one used to see in the fashionable suburbs ofCheltenham or Leamington, presents nothing to their study but gravel,and gas-lamp posts; the modern addition of a vermilion letter-pillarcontributing indeed to the splendour, but scarcely to the interest ofthe scene; and a child of any sense or fancy would hastily contriveescape from such a barren desert of politeness, and betake itself toinvestigation, such as might be feasible, of the natural history ofCroxsted Lane.
But, for its sense or fancy, what food, or stimulus, can it find, inthat foul causeway of its youthful pilgrimage? What would have happenedto myself, so directed, I cannot clearly imagine. Possibly, I might havegot interested in the old iron and wood-shavings; and become an engineeror a carpenter: but for the children of to-day, accustomed from theinstant they are out of their cradles, to the sight of this infinitenastiness, prevailing as a fixed condition of the universe, over theface of nature, and accompanying all the operations of industrious man,what is to be the scholastic issue? unless, indeed, the thrill ofscientific vanity in the primary analysis of some unheard-of process ofcorruption--or the reward of microscopic research in the sight of wormswith more legs, and acari of more curious generation than ever vivifiedthe more simply smelling plasma of antiquity.
One result of such elementary education is, however, already certain;namely, that the pleasure which we may conceive taken by the children ofthe coming time, in the analysis of physical corruption, guides, intofields more dangerous and desolate, the expatiation of imaginativeliterature: and that the reactions of moral disease upon itself, and theconditions of languidly monstrous character developed in an atmosphereof low vitality, have become the most valued material of modernfiction, and the most eagerly discussed texts of modern philosophy.
The many concurrent reasons for this mischief may, I believe, be massedunder a few general heads.
I. There is first the hot fermentation and unwholesome secrecy of thepopulation crowded into large cities, each mote in the misery lighter,as an individual soul, than a dead leaf, but becoming oppressive andinfectious each to his neighbour, in the smoking mass of decay. Theresulting modes of mental ruin and distress are continually new; and ina certain sense, worth study in their monstrosity: they have accordinglydeveloped a corresponding science of fiction, concerned mainly with thedescription of such forms of disease, like the botany of leaf-lichens.
In De Balzac's story of _Father Goriot_, a grocer makes a large fortune,of which he spends on himself as much as may keep him alive; and on histwo daughters, all that can promote their pleasures or their pride. Hemarries them to men of rank, supplies their secret expenses, andprovides for his favourite a separate and clandestine establishment withher lover. On his deathbed, he sends for this favourite daughter, whowishes to come, and hesitates for a quarter of an hour between doing so,and going to a ball at which it has been for the last month her chiefambition to be seen. She finally goes to the ball.
This story is, of course, one of which the violent contrasts andspectral catastrophe could only take place, or be conceived, in a largecity. A village grocer cannot make a large fortune, cannot marry hisdaughters to titled squires, and cannot die without having his childrenbrought to him, if in the neighbourhood, by fear of village gossip, iffor no better cause.
II. But a much more profound feeling than this mere curiosity of sciencein morbid phenomena is concerned in the production of the carefullestforms of modern fiction. The disgrace and grief resulting from the meretrampling pressure and electric friction of town life, become to thesufferers peculiarly mysterious in their undeservedness, and frightfulin their inevitableness. The power of all surroundings over them forevil; the incapacity of their own minds to refuse the pollution, and oftheir own wills to oppose the weight, of the staggering mass that chokesand crushes them into perdition, brings every law of healthy existenceinto question with them, and every alleged method of help and hope intodoubt. Indignation, without any calming faith in justice, andself-contempt, without any curative self-reproach, dull theintelligence, and degrade the conscience, into sullen incredulity of allsunshine outside the dunghill, or breeze beyond the wafting of itsim
purity; and at last a philosophy develops itself, partly satiric,partly consolatory, concerned only with the regenerative vigour ofmanure, and the necessary obscurities of fimetic Providence; showing howeverybody's fault is somebody else's, how infection has no law,digestion no will, and profitable dirt no dishonour.
And thus an elaborate and ingenious scholasticism, in what may be calledthe Divinity of Decomposition, has established itself in connection withthe more recent forms of romance, giving them at once a complacent toneof clerical dignity, and an agreeable dash of heretical impudence; whilethe inculcated doctrine has the double advantage of needing no laboriousscholarship for its foundation, and no painful self-denial for itspractice.
III. The monotony of life in the central streets of any great moderncity, but especially in those of London, where every emotion intended tobe derived by men from the sight of nature, or the sense of art, isforbidden for ever, leaves the craving of the heart for a sincere, yetchangeful, interest, to be fed from one source only. Under naturalconditions the degree of mental excitement necessary to bodily health isprovided by the course of the seasons, and the various skill and fortuneof agriculture. In the country every morning of the year brings with ita new aspect of springing or fading nature; a new duty to be fulfilledupon earth, and a new promise or warning in heaven. No day is withoutits innocent hope, its special prudence, its kindly gift, and itssublime danger; and in every process of wise husbandry, and everyeffort of contending or remedial courage, the wholesome passions, pride,and bodily power of the labourer are excited and exerted in happiestunison. The companionship of domestic, the care of serviceable, animals,soften and enlarge his life with lowly charities, and discipline him infamiliar wisdoms and unboastful fortitudes; while the divine laws ofseed-time which cannot be recalled, harvest which cannot be hastened,and winter in which no man can work, compel the impatiences and covetingof his heart into labour too submissive to be anxious, and rest toosweet to be wanton. What thought can enough comprehend the contrastbetween such life, and that in streets where summer and winter are onlyalternations of heat and cold; where snow never fell white, nor sunshineclear; where the ground is only a pavement, and the sky no more than theglass roof of an arcade; where the utmost power of a storm is to chokethe gutters, and the finest magic of spring, to change mud into dust:where--chief and most fatal difference in state, there is no interest ofoccupation for any of the inhabitants but the routine of counter or deskwithin doors, and the effort to pass each other without collisionoutside; so that from morning to evening the only possible variation ofthe monotony of the hours, and lightening of the penalty of existence,must be some kind of mischief, limited, unless by more than ordinarygodsend of fatality, to the fall of a horse, or the slitting of apocket.
I said that under these laws of inanition, the craving of the humanheart for some kind of excitement could be supplied from _one_ sourceonly. It might have been thought by any other than a sternly tentativephilosopher, that the denial of their natural food to human feelingswould have provoked a reactionary desire for it; and that the drearinessof the street would have been gilded by dreams of pastoral felicity.Experience has shown the fact to be otherwise; the thoroughly trainedLondoner can enjoy no other excitement than that to which he has beenaccustomed, but asks for _that_ in continually more ardent or morevirulent concentration; and the ultimate power of fiction to entertainhim is by varying to his fancy the modes, and defining for his dulnessthe horrors, of Death. In the single novel of _Bleak House_ there arenine deaths (or left for death's, in the drop scene) carefully wroughtout or led up to, either by way of pleasing surprise, as the baby's atthe brickmaker's, or finished in their threatenings and sufferings, withas much enjoyment as can be contrived in the anticipation, and as muchpathology as can be concentrated in the description. Under the followingvarieties of method:--
One by assassination Mr. Tulkinghorn. One by starvation, with phthisis Joe. One by chagrin Richard. One by spontaneous combustion Mr. Krook. One by sorrow Lady Dedlock's lover. One by remorse Lady Dedlock. One by insanity Miss Flite. One by paralysis Sir Leicester.
Besides the baby, by fever, and a lively young Frenchwoman left to behanged.
And all this, observe, not in a tragic, adventurous, or military story,but merely as the further enlivenment of a narrative intended to beamusing; and as a properly representative average of the statistics ofcivilian mortality in the centre of London.
Observe further, and chiefly. It is not the mere number of deaths(which, if we count the odd troopers in the last scene, is exceeded in_Old Mortality_, and reached, within one or two, both in _Waverley_ and_Guy Mannering_) that marks the peculiar tone of the modern novel. It isthe fact that all these deaths, but one, are of inoffensive, or at leastin the world's estimate respectable persons; and that they are allgrotesquely either violent or miserable, purporting thus to illustratethe modern theology that the appointed destiny of a large average of ourpopulation is to die like rats in a drain, either by trap or poison.Not, indeed, that a lawyer in full practice can be usually supposed asfaultless in the eye of heaven as a dove or a woodcock; but it is not,in former divinities, thought the will of Providence that he should bedropped by a shot from a client behind his fire-screen, and retrieved inthe morning by his housemaid under the chandelier. Neither is LadyDedlock less reprehensible in her conduct than many women of fashionhave been and will be: but it would not therefore have been thoughtpoetically just, in old-fashioned morality, that she should be found byher daughter lying dead, with her face in the mud of a St. Giles'schurchyard.
In the work of the great masters death is always either heroic,deserved, or quiet and natural (unless their purpose be totally anddeeply tragic, when collateral meaner death is permitted, like that ofPolonius or Roderigo). In _Old Mortality_, four of the deaths,Bothwell's, Ensign Grahame's, Macbriar's, and Evandale's, aremagnificently heroic; Burley's and Oliphant's long deserved, and swift;the troopers', met in the discharge of their military duty, and the oldmiser's, as gentle as the passing of a cloud, and almost beautiful inits last words of--now unselfish--care.
'Ailie' (he aye ca'd me Ailie, we were auld acquaintance,) 'Ailie, take ye care and haud the gear weel thegither; for the name of Morton of Milnwood's gane out like the last sough of an auld sang.' And sae he fell out o' ae dwam into another, and ne'er spak a word mair, unless it were something we cou'dna mak out, about a dipped candle being gude eneugh to see to dee wi'. He cou'd ne'er bide to see a moulded ane, and there was ane, by ill luck, on the table.
In _Guy Mannering_, the murder, though unpremeditated, of a singleperson, (himself not entirely innocent, but at least by heartlessness ina cruel function earning his fate,) is avenged to the uttermost on allthe men conscious of the crime; Mr. Bertram's death, like that of hiswife, brief in pain, and each told in the space of half-a-dozen lines;and that of the heroine of the tale, self-devoted, heroic in thehighest, and happy.
Nor is it ever to be forgotten, in the comparison of Scott's withinferior work, that his own splendid powers were, even in early life,tainted, and in his latter years destroyed, by modern conditions ofcommercial excitement, then first, but rapidly, developing themselves.There are parts even in his best novels coloured to meet tastes which hedespised; and many pages written in his later ones to lengthen hisarticle for the indiscriminate market.
But there was one weakness of which his healthy mind remained incapableto the last. In modern stories prepared for more refined or fastidiousaudiences than those of Dickens, the funereal excitement is obtained,for the most part, not by the infliction of violent or disgusting death;but in the suspense, the pathos, and the more or less by all felt, andrecognised, mortal phenomena of the sick-room. The temptation, to weakwriters, of this order of subject is especially great, because the studyof it from the living--or dying--model is so easy, a
nd to many has beenthe most impressive part of their own personal experience; while, if thedescription be given even with mediocre accuracy, a very large sectionof readers will admire its truth, and cherish its melancholy: Fewauthors of second or third rate genius can either record or invent aprobable conversation in ordinary life; but few, on the other hand, areso destitute of observant faculty as to be unable to chronicle thebroken syllables and languid movements of an invalid. The easilyrendered, and too surely recognised, image of familiar suffering is feltat once to be real where all else had been false; and the historian ofthe gestures of fever and words of delirium can count on the applause ofa gratified audience as surely as the dramatist who introduces on thestage of his flagging action a carriage that can be driven or a fountainthat will flow. But the masters of strong imagination disdain such work,and those of deep sensibility shrink from it.[154] Only under conditionsof personal weakness, presently to be noted, would Scott comply with thecravings of his lower audience in scenes of terror like the death ofFront-de-Boeuf. But he never once withdrew the sacred curtain of thesick-chamber, nor permitted the disgrace of wanton tears round thehumiliation of strength, or the wreck of beauty.
IV. No exception to this law of reverence will be found in the scenes inCoeur de Lion's illness introductory to the principal incident in the_Talisman_. An inferior writer would have made the king charge inimagination at the head of his chivalry, or wander in dreams by thebrooks of Aquitaine; but Scott allows us to learn no more startlingsymptoms of the king's malady than that he was restless and impatient,and could not wear his armour. Nor is any bodily weakness, or crisis ofdanger, permitted to disturb for an instant the royalty of intelligenceand heart in which he examines, trusts and obeys the physician whom hisattendants fear.
Yet the choice of the main subject in this story and its companion--thetrial, to a point of utter torture, of knightly faith, and severalpassages in the conduct of both, more especially the exaggerated scenesin the House of Baldringham, and hermitage of Engedi, are signs of thegradual decline in force of intellect and soul which those who loveScott best have done him the worst injustice in their endeavours todisguise or deny. The mean anxieties, moral humiliations, andmercilessly demanded brain-toil, which killed him, show their sepulchralgrasp for many and many a year before their final victory; and thestates of more or less dulled, distorted, and polluted imagination whichculminate in _Castle Dangerous_, cast a Stygian hue over _St. Ronan'sWell, The Fair Maid of Perth_, and _Anne of Geierstein_, which lowersthem, the first altogether, the other two at frequent intervals, intofellowship with the normal disease which festers throughout the wholebody of our lower fictitious literature.
Fictitious! I use the ambiguous word deliberately; for it is impossibleto distinguish in these tales of the prison-house how far their vice andgloom are thrown into their manufacture only to meet a vile demand, andhow far they are an integral condition of thought in the minds of mentrained from their youth up in the knowledge of Londinian and Parisianmisery. The speciality of the plague is a delight in the exposition ofthe relations between guilt and decrepitude; and I call the results ofit literature 'of the prison-house,' because the thwarted habits of bodyand mind, which are the punishment of reckless crowding in cities,become, in the issue of that punishment, frightful subjects of exclusiveinterest to themselves; and the art of fiction in which they finallydelight is only the more studied arrangement and illustration, bycoloured firelights, of the daily bulletins of their own wretchedness,in the prison calendar, the police news, and the hospital report.
The reader will perhaps be surprised at my separating the greatest workof Dickens, _Oliver Twist_, with honour, from the loathsome mass towhich it typically belongs. That book is an earnest and uncaricaturedrecord of states of criminal life, written with didactic purpose, fullof the gravest instruction, nor destitute of pathetic studies of noblepassion. Even the _Mysteries of Paris_ and Gaboriau's _Crime d'Augival_are raised, by their definiteness of historical intention andforewarning anxiety, far above the level of their order, and may beaccepted as photographic evidence of an otherwise incrediblecivilisation, corrupted in the infernal fact of it, down to the genesisof such figures as the Vicomte d'Augival, the Stabber,[155] theSkeleton, and the She-wolf. But the effectual head of the wholecretinous school is the renowned novel in which the hunchbacked loverwatches the execution of his mistress from the tower of Notre-Dame; andits strength passes gradually away into the anatomical preparations, forthe general market, of novels like _Poor Miss Finch_, in which theheroine is blind, the hero epileptic, and the obnoxious brother is founddead with his hands dropped off, in the Arctic regions.[156]
This literature of the Prison-house, understanding by the word not onlythe cell of Newgate, but also and even more definitely the cell of theHotel-Dieu, the Hopital des Fous, and the grated corridor with thedripping slabs of the Morgue, having its central root thus in the Ilede Paris--or historically and pre-eminently the 'Cite de Paris'--is,when understood deeply, the precise counter-corruption of the religionof the Sainte Chapelle, just as the worst forms of bodily and mentalruin are the corruption of love. I have therefore called it 'Fictionmecroyante,' with literal accuracy and precision; according to theexplanation of the word which the reader may find in any good Frenchdictionary,[157] and round its Arctic pole in the Morgue, he may gatherinto one Caina of gelid putrescence the entire product of modern infidelimagination, amusing itself with destruction of the body, and busyingitself with aberration of the mind.
Aberration, palsy, or plague, observe, as distinguished from normalevil, just as the venom of rabies or cholera differs from that of a waspor a viper. The life of the insect and serpent deserves, or at leastpermits, our thoughts; not so, the stages of agony in the fury-drivenhound. There is some excuse, indeed, for the pathologic labour of themodern novelist in the fact that he cannot easily, in a city population,find a healthy mind to vivisect: but the greater part of such amateursurgery is the struggle, in an epoch of wild literary competition, toobtain novelty of material. The varieties of aspect and colour inhealthy fruit, be it sweet or sour, may be within certain limitsdescribed exhaustively. Not so the blotches of its conceivable blight:and while the symmetries of integral human character can only be tracedby harmonious and tender skill, like the branches of a living tree, thefaults and gaps of one gnawed away by corroding accident can be shuffledinto senseless change like the wards of a Chubb lock.
V. It is needless to insist on the vast field for this dice-cast orcard-dealt calamity which opens itself in the ignorance, money-interest,and mean passion, of city marriage. Peasants know each other aschildren--meet, as they grow up in testing labour; and if a stoutfarmer's son marries a handless girl, it is his own fault. Also in thepatrician families of the field, the young people know what they aredoing, and marry a neighbouring estate, or a covetable title, with someconception of the responsibilities they undertake. But even among these,their season in the confused metropolis creates licentious andfortuitous temptation before unknown; and in the lower middle orders, anentirely new kingdom of discomfort and disgrace has been preached tothem in the doctrines of unbridled pleasure which are merely an apologyfor their peculiar forms of illbreeding. It is quite curious how oftenthe catastrophe, or the leading interest, of a modern novel, turns uponthe want, both in maid and bachelor, of the common self-command whichwas taught to their grandmothers and grandfathers as the first elementof ordinarily decent behaviour. Rashly inquiring the other day the plotof a modern story from a female friend, I elicited, after somehesitation, that it hinged mainly on the young people's 'forgettingthemselves in a boat;' and I perceive it to be accepted as nearly anaxiom in the code of modern civic chivalry that the strength of amiablesentiment is proved by our incapacity on proper occasions to express,and on improper ones to control it. The pride of a gentleman of the oldschool used to be in his power of saying what he meant, and being silentwhen he ought, (not to speak of the higher nobleness which bestowed lovewhere it was honourable, and reverence where i
t was due); but theautomatic amours and involuntary proposals of recent romance acknowledgelittle further law of morality than the instinct of an insect, or theeffervescence 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 troublein explaining the disciplinarian authority of mere old-fashionedpoliteness, as in some sort protective of higher things. It describes,with much grace and precision, a state of society by no meanspre-eminently virtuous, or enthusiastically heroic; in which many peopledo extremely wrong, and none sublimely right. But as there are heightsof which the achievement is unattempted, there are abysses to which fallis barred; neither accident nor temptation will make any of theprincipal personages swerve from an adopted resolution, or violate anaccepted principle of honour; people are expected as a matter of courseto speak with propriety on occasion, and to wait with patience when theyare bid: those who do wrong, admit it; those who do right don't boast ofit; everybody knows his own mind, and everybody has good manners.
Nor must it be forgotten that in the worst days of the self-indulgencewhich destroyed the aristocracies of Europe, their vices, howeverlicentious, were never, in the fatal modern sense, 'unprincipled.' Thevainest believed in virtue; the vilest respected it. 'Chaque chose avaitson nom,'[158] and the severest of English moralists recognises theaccurate wit, the lofty intellect, and the unfretted benevolence, whichredeemed from vitiated surroundings the circle of d'Alembert andMarmontel.[159]
I have said, with too slight praise, that the vainest, in those days,'believed' in virtue. Beautiful and heroic examples of it were alwaysbefore them; nor was it without the secret significance attaching towhat may seem the least accidents in the work of a master, that Scottgave to both his heroines of the age of revolution in England the nameof the queen of the highest order of English chivalry.[160]
It is to say little for the types of youth and maid which alone Scottfelt it a joy to imagine, or thought it honourable to portray, that theyact and feel in a sphere where they are never for an instant liable toany of the weaknesses which disturb the calm, or shake the resolution,of chastity and courage in a modern novel. Scott lived in a country andtime, when, from highest to lowest, but chiefly in that dignified andnobly severe[161] middle class to which he himself belonged, a habit ofserene and stainless thought was as natural to the people as theirmountain air. Women like Rose Bradwardine and Ailie Dinmont were thegrace and guard of almost every household (God be praised that the raceof them is not yet extinct, for all that Mall or Boulevard can do), andit has perhaps escaped the notice of even attentive readers that thecomparatively uninteresting character of Sir Walter's heroes had alwaysbeen studied among a class of youths who were simply incapable of doinganything seriously wrong; and could only be embarrassed by theconsequences of their levity or imprudence.
But there is another difference in the woof of a Waverley novel from thecobweb of a modern one, which depends on Scott's larger view of humanlife. Marriage is by no means, in his conception of man and woman, themost important business of their existence;[162] nor love the onlyreward to be proposed to their virtue or exertion. It is not in hisreading of the laws of Providence a necessity that virtue should, eitherby love or any other external blessing, be rewarded at all;[163] andmarriage is in all cases thought of as a constituent of the happiness oflife, but not as its only interest, still less its only aim. And uponanalysing with some care the motives of his principal stories, we shalloften find that the love in them is merely a light by which the sternerfeatures of character are to be irradiated, and that the marriage of thehero is as subordinate to the main bent of the story as Henry theFifth's courtship of Katherine is to the battle of Agincourt. Nay, thefortunes of the person who is nominally the subject of the tale areoften little more than a background on which grander figures are to bedrawn, and deeper fates forth-shadowed. The judgments between the faithand chivalry of Scotland at Drumclog and Bothwell bridge owe little oftheir interest in the mind of a sensible reader to the fact that thecaptain of the Popinjay is carried a prisoner to one battle, and returnsa prisoner from the other: and Scott himself, while he watches the whitesail that bears Queen Mary for the last time from her native land, verynearly forgets to finish his novel, or to tell us--and with small senseof 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 sometimesscornful, glance with which Scott passes over scenes which a novelist ofour own day would have analysed with the airs of a philosopher, andpainted with the curiosity of a gossip, indicate any absence in hisheart of sympathy with the great and sacred elements of personalhappiness. An era like ours, which has with diligence and ostentationswept its heart clear of all the passions once known as loyalty,patriotism, and piety, necessarily magnifies the apparent force of theone remaining sentiment which sighs through the barren chambers, orclings inextricably round the chasms of ruin; nor can it but regard withawe the unconquerable spirit which still tempts or betrays thesagacities of selfishness into error or frenzy which is believed to belove.
That Scott was never himself, in the sense of the phrase as employed bylovers of the Parisian school, 'ivre d'amour,' may be admitted withoutprejudice to his sensibility,[164] and that he never knew 'l'amor chemove 'l sol e l'altre stelle,' was the chief, though unrecognised,calamity of his deeply chequered life. But the reader of honour andfeeling will not therefore suppose that the love which Miss Vernonsacrifices, stooping for an instant from her horse, is of less noblestamp, or less enduring faith, than that which troubles and degradesthe whole existence of Consuelo; or that the affection of Jeanie Deansfor the companion of her childhood, drawn like a field of soft blueheaven beyond the cloudy wrack of her sorrow, is less fully inpossession of her soul than the hesitating and self-reproachful impulsesunder which a modern heroine forgets herself in a boat, or compromisesherself 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 andthe Faubourgs; but it may be, perhaps, interesting at this moment toexamine, with illustration from those Waverley novels which have solately _re_tracted the attention of a fair and gentle public, theuniversal conditions of 'style,' rightly so called, which are in allages, and above all local currents or wavering tides of temporarymanners, pillars of what is for ever strong, and models of what is forever fair.
But I must first define, and that within strict horizon, the works ofScott, in which his perfect mind may be known, and his chosen waysunderstood.
His great works of prose fiction, excepting only the first half-volumeof _Waverley_, were all written in twelve years, 1814-26 (of his own ageforty-three to fifty-five), the actual time employed in theircomposition being not more than a couple of months out of each year; andduring that time only the morning hours and spare minutes during theprofessional day. 'Though the first volume of _Waverley_ was begun longago, and actually lost for a time, yet the other two were begun andfinished between the 4th of June and the first of July, during all whichI attended my duty in court, and proceeded without loss of time orhindrance 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 moresingular, or more sure, than the statement, apparently so encouraging tothe idle, that if a great thing can be done at all, it can be doneeasily. But it is in that kind of ease with which a tree blossoms afterlong years of gathered strength, and all Scott's great writings were therecreations of a mind confirmed in dutiful labour, and rich with organicgathering 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 tobe noticed, the unhappy _St. Ronan's_, the memorable romances of Scottare eighteen, falling into three distinct groups, containing six each
.
The first group is distinguished from the other two by characters ofstrength and felicity which never more appeared after Scott was struckdown by his terrific illness in 1819. It includes _Waverley_, _GuyMannering_, _The Antiquary_, _Rob Roy_, _Old Mortality_, and _The Heartof 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 onthe preceding 15th of August) he began for the first time todictate--being unable for the exertion of writing--_The Bride ofLammermuir_, 'the affectionate Laidlaw beseeching him to stop dictating,when his audible suffering filled every pause. "Nay, Willie," heanswered "only see that the doors are fast. I would fain keep all thecry 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 thebrightness of joy and sincerity of inevitable humour, which perfectedthe imagery of the earlier novels, are wholly absent, except in the twoshort 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'sgenius, that these revivals of earlier power were unconscious, and thatthe time of extreme weakness in which he wrote _St. Ronan's Well_, wasthat in which he first asserted his own restoration.
It is also a deeply interesting characteristic of his noble nature thathe never gains anything by sickness; the whole man breathes or faintsas one creature; the ache that stiffens a limb chills his heart, andevery pang of the stomach paralyses the brain. It is not so withinferior minds, in the workings of which it is often impossible todistinguish native from narcotic fancy, and throbs of conscience fromthose of indigestion. Whether in exaltation or languor, the colours ofmind are always morbid, which gleam on the sea for the 'AncientMariner,' and through the casements on 'St. Agnes' Eve;' but Scott is atonce blinded and stultified by sickness; never has a fit of the crampwithout spoiling a chapter, and is perhaps the only author of vividimagination who never wrote a foolish word but when he was ill.
It remains only to be noticed on this point that any strong naturalexcitement, affecting the deeper springs of his heart, would at oncerestore his intellectual powers in all their fullness, and that, fartowards their sunset: but that the strong will on which he pridedhimself, though it could trample upon pain, silence grief, and compelindustry, never could warm his imagination, or clear the judgment in hisdarker hours.
I believe that this power of the heart over the intellect is common toall great men: but what the special character of emotion was, that alonecould 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 theemphasis of his unharmed faculties. The second group, composed in thethree years subsequent to illness all but mortal, bear every one of themmore 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 brokenhealth on all these are essentially twofold--prevailing melancholy, andfantastic improbability. Three of the tales are agonizingly tragic, the_Abbot_ scarcely less so in its main event, and _Ivanhoe_ deeply woundedthrough all its bright panoply; while even in that most powerful of theseries, the impossible archeries and axestrokes, the incrediblyopportune appearances of Locksley, the death of Ulrica, and theresuscitation of Athelstane, are partly boyish, partly feverish. Calebin the _Bride_, Triptolemus and Halcro in the _Pirate_, are alllaborious, and the first incongruous; half a volume of the _Abbot_ isspent in extremely dull detail of Roland's relations with hisfellow-servants and his mistress, which have nothing whatever to do withthe future story; and the lady of Avenel herself disappears after thefirst volume, 'like a snaw wreath when it's thaw, Jeanie.' The publichas for itself pronounced on the _Monastery_, though as much too harshlyas it has foolishly praised the horrors of _Ravenswood_ and the nonsenseof _Ivanhoe_; because the modern public finds in the torture andadventure of these, the kind of excitement which it seeks at an opera,while it has no sympathy whatever with the pastoral happiness ofGlendearg, or with the lingering simplicities of superstition which givehistorical 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 artificiallabour on _Ivanhoe_. 'It was a relief,' he said, 'to interlay thescenery most familiar to me[168] with the strange world for which I hadto draw so much on imagination.'[169] Through all the closing scenes ofthe second he is raised to his own true level by his love for thequeen. And within the code of Scott's work to which I am about to appealfor 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 slovenlyand diffuse _Peveril_, written for the trade; the sickly _Tales of theCrusaders_, and the entirely broken and diseased _St. Ronan's Well_.This last I throw out of count altogether, and of the rest, accept onlythe four first named as sound work; so that the list of the novels inwhich I propose to examine his methods and ideal standards, reducesitself to these following twelve (named in order of production):_Waverley_, _Guy Mannering_, the _Antiquary_, _Rob Roy_, _OldMortality_, 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 Imay fitly close by pointing out some of the merely verbalcharacteristics of his style, illustrative in little ways of thequestions we have been examining, and chiefly of the one which may bemost embarrassing to many readers, the difference, namely, betweencharacter and disease.
One quite distinctive charm in the Waverleys is their modified use ofthe Scottish dialect; but it has not generally been observed, either bytheir imitators, or the authors of different taste who have written fora later public, that there is a difference between the dialect of alanguage, and its corruption.
A dialect is formed in any district where there are persons ofintelligence enough to use the language itself in all its fineness andforce, but under the particular conditions of life, climate, and temper,which introduce words peculiar to the scenery, forms of word and idiomsof sentence peculiar to the race, and pronunciations indicative of theircharacter and disposition.
Thus 'burn' (of a streamlet) is a word possible only in a country wherethere are brightly running waters, 'lassie,' a word possible only wheregirls 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 theordinary sense of the phrase, 'broad' forms of utterance, are notdialects at all, having nothing dialectic in them, and all phrasesdeveloped in states of rude employment, and restricted intercourse, areinjurious to the tone and narrowing to the power of the language theyaffect. Mere breadth of accent does not spoil a dialect as long as thespeakers are men of varied idea and good intelligence; but the momentthe life is contracted by mining, millwork, or any oppressive andmonotonous labour, the accents and phrases become debased. It is part ofthe popular folly of the day to find pleasure in trying to write andspell these abortive, crippled, and more or less brutal forms of humanspeech.
Abortive, crippled, or brutal, are however not necessarily 'corrupted'dialects. Corrupt language is that gathered by ignorance, invented byvice, misused by insensibility, or minced and mouthed by affectation,especially in the attempt to deal with words of which only half themeaning is understood, or half the sound heard. Mrs. Gamp's 'aperientlyso'--and the 'undermined' with primal sense of undermine, of--I forgetwhich gossip, in the _Mill on the Floss_, are master- andmistress-pieces in this latter kind. Mrs. Malaprop's 'allegories on thebanks of the Nile' are in a somewhat higher order of mistake: MissTabitha Bramble's ignorance is
vulgarised by her selfishness, andWinifred Jenkins' by her conceit. The 'wot' of Noah Claypole, and theother degradations of cockneyism (Sam Weller and his father are innothing more admirable than in the power of heart and sense that canpurify even these); the 'trewth' of Mr. Chadband, and 'natur' of Mr.Squeers, are examples of the corruption of words by insensibility: theuse 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 afragment of Scott's Lowland Scottish dialect; not choosing it of themost beautiful kind; on the contrary, it shall be a piece reaching aslow down as he ever allows Scotch to go--it is perhaps the only unfairpatriotism in him, that if ever he wants a word or two of reallyvillainous slang, he gives it in English or Dutch--not Scotch.
I had intended in the close of this paper to analyse and compare thecharacters of Andrew Fairservice and Richie Moniplies for examples, theformer of innate evil, unaffected by external influences, andundiseased, but distinct from natural goodness as a nettle is distinctfrom balm or lavender; and the latter of innate goodness, contracted andpinched by circumstance, but still undiseased, as an oak-leaf crisped byfrost, 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 gooddeal to think of.
I take his account of the rescue of Glasgow Cathedral at the time of theReformation.
Ah! it's a brave kirk--nane o' yere whigmaleeries and curliewurlies and opensteek hems about it--a' solid, weel-jointed mason-wark, that will stand as lang as the warld, keep hands and gunpowther aff it. It had amaist a douncome lang syne at the Reformation, when they pu'd doun the kirks of St. Andrews and Perth, and thereawa', to cleanse them o' Papery, and idolatry, and image-worship, and surplices, and sic-like rags o' the muckle hure that sitteth on seven hills, as if ane wasna braid eneugh for her auld hinder end. Sae the commons o' Renfrew, and o' the Barony, and the Gorbals, and a' about, they behoved to come into Glasgow ae fair morning, to try their hand on purging the High Kirk o' Popish nicknackets. But the townsmen o' Glasgow, they were feared their auld edifice might slip the girths in gaun through siccan rough physic, sae they rang the common bell, and assembled the train-bands wi' took o' drum. By good luck, the worthy James Rabat was Dean o' Guild that year--(and a gude mason he was himsell, made him the keener to keep up the auld bigging), and the trades assembled, and offered downright battle to the commons, rather than their kirk should coup the crans, as others had done elsewhere. It wasna for luve o' Paperie--na, na!--nane could ever say that o' the trades o' Glasgow--Sae they sune came to an agreement to take a' the idolatrous statues of sants (sorrow be on them!) out o' their neuks--And sae the bits o' stane idols were broken in pieces by Scripture warrant, and flung into the Molendinar burn, and the auld kirk stood as crouse as a cat when the flaes are kaimed aff her, and a'body was alike pleased. And I hae heard wise folk say, that if the same had been done in ilka kirk in Scotland, the Reform wad just hae been as pure as it is e'en now, and we wad hae mair Christian-like kirks; for I hae been sae lang in England, that naething will drived out o' my head, that the dog-kennel at Osbaldistone-Hall is better than mony a house o' God in Scotland.
Now this sentence is in the first place a piece of Scottish history ofquite inestimable and concentrated value. Andrew's temperamentis the type of a vast class of Scottish--shall we call it'_sow_-thistlian'--mind, which necessarily takes the view of either Popeor saint that the thistle in Lebanon took of the cedar or lilies inLebanon; and the entire force of the passions which, in the Scottishrevolution, foretold and forearmed the French one, is told in this oneparagraph; the coarseness of it, observe, being admitted, not for thesake of the laugh, any more than an onion in broth merely for itsflavour, but for the meat of it; the inherent constancy of thatcoarseness being a fact in this order of mind, and an essential part ofthe history to be told.
Secondly, observe that this speech, in the religious passion of it, suchas there may be, is entirely sincere. Andrew is a thief, a liar, acoward, and, in the Fair service from which he takes his name, ahypocrite; but in the form of prejudice, which is all that his mind iscapable of in the place of religion, he is entirely sincere. He does notin the least pretend detestation of image worship to please his master,or any one else; he honestly scorns the 'carnal morality[171] as dowdand fusionless as rue-leaves at Yule' of the sermon in the uppercathedral; and when wrapt in critical attention to the 'real savour o'doctrine' in the crypt, so completely forgets the hypocrisy of his fairservice as to return his master's attempt to disturb him with hardpunches of the elbow.
Thirdly. He is a man of no mean sagacity, quite up to the averagestandard of Scottish common sense, not a low one; and, though incapableof understanding any manner of lofty thought or passion, is a shrewdmeasurer of weaknesses, and not without a spark or two of kindlyfeeling. See first his sketch of his master's character to Mr.Hammorgaw, beginning: 'He's no a'thegither sae void o' sense, neither;'and then the close of the dialogue: 'But the lad's no a bad lad aftera', and he needs some carefu' body to look after him.'
Fourthly. He is a good workman; knows his own business well, and canjudge of other craft, if sound, or otherwise.
All these four qualities of him must be known before we can understandthis single speech. Keeping them in mind, I take it up, word by word.
You observe, in the outset, Scott makes no attempt whatever to indicateaccents or modes of pronunciation by changed spelling, unless the wordbecomes a quite definitely new and scarcely writeable one. The Scottishway of pronouncing 'James,' for instance, is entirely peculiar, andextremely pleasant to the ear. But it is so, just because it does _not_change the word into Jeems, nor into Jims, nor into Jawms. A modernwriter of dialects would think it amusing to use one or other of theseugly spellings. But Scott writes the name in pure English, knowing thata Scots reader will speak it rightly, and an English one be wise inletting it alone. On the other hand he writes 'weel' for 'well,' becausethat word is complete in its change, and may be very closely expressedby the double _e_. The ambiguous '_u_'s in 'gude' and 'sune' areadmitted, because far liker the sound than the double _o_ would be, andthat in 'hure,' for grace' sake, to soften the word;--so also 'flaes'for 'fleas.' 'Mony' for 'many' is again positively right in sound, and'neuk' differs from our 'nook' in sense, and is not the same word atall, as we shall presently see.
Secondly, observe, not a word is corrupted in any indecent haste,slowness, slovenliness, or incapacity of pronunciation. There is nolisping, drawling, slobbering, or snuffling: the speech is as clear asa bell and as keen as an arrow: and its elisions and contractions areeither melodious, ('na,' for 'not,'--'pu'd,' for 'pulled,') or as normalas in a Latin verse. The long words are delivered without the slightestbungling; and 'bigging' finished to its last _g_.
I take the important words now in their places.
_Brave._ The old English sense of the word in 'to go brave' retained,expressing Andrew's sincere and respectful admiration. Had he meant toinsinuate a hint of the church's being too fine, he would have said'braw.'
_Kirk._ This is of course just as pure and unprovincial a word as'Kirche,' or 'eglise.'
_Whigmaleerie._ I cannot get at the root of this word, but it is oneshowing that the speaker is not bound by classic rules, but will use anysyllables that enrich his meaning. 'Nipperty-tipperty' (of his master's'poetry-nonsense') is another word of the same class. 'Curlieurlie' isof course just as pure as Shakespeare's 'Hurly-burly.' But see firstsuggestion of the idea to Scott at Blair-Adam (L. vi. 264).
_Opensteek hems._ More description, or better, of the later Gothiccannot be put into four syllables. 'Steek,' melodious for stitch, has acombined sense of closing or fastening. And note that the later Gothic,being precisely what Scott knew best (in Melrose) and liked best, it is,here as elsewhere, quit
e as much himself[172] as Frank, that he islaughing at, when he laughs _with_ Andrew, whose 'opensteek hems' areonly a ruder metaphor for his own 'willow-wreaths changed to stone.'
_Gunpowther._ '-Ther' is a lingering vestige of the French '-dre.'
_Syne._ One of the melodious and mysterious Scottish words which havepartly the sound of wind and stream in them, and partly the range ofsoftened idea which is like a distance of blue hills over border land('far in the distant Cheviot's blue'). Perhaps even the leastsympathetic 'Englisher' might recognise this, if he heard 'Old LongSince' vocally substituted for the Scottish words to the air. I do notknow the root; but the word's proper meaning is not 'since,' but beforeor after an interval of some duration, 'as weel sune as syne.' 'Butfirst on Sawnie gies a ca', Syne, bauldly in she enters.'
_Behoved_ (_to come_). A rich word, with peculiar idiom, always usedmore or less ironically of anything done under a partly mistaken andpartly pretended notion of duty.
_Siccan._ Far prettier, and fuller in meaning than 'such.' It containsan added sense of wonder; and means properly 'so great' or 'so unusual.'
_Took_ (_o' drum_). Classical 'tuck' from Italian 'toccata,' thepreluding 'touch' or flourish, on any instrument (but see Johnson underword 'tucket,' quoting _Othello_). The deeper Scottish vowels are usedhere to mark the deeper sound of the bass drum, as in more solemnwarning.
_Bigging._ The only word in all the sentence of which the Scottish formis less melodious than the English, 'and what for no,' seeing thatScottish architecture is mostly little beyond Bessie Bell's and MaryGray's? 'They biggit a bow're by yon burnside, and theekit it ow're wirashes.' But it is pure Anglo-Saxon in roots; see glossary toFairbairn's edition of the Douglas _Virgil_, 1710.
_Coup._ Another of the much-embracing words; short for 'upset,' but witha sense of awkwardness as the inherent cause of fall; compare RichieMoniplies (also for sense of 'behoved'): 'Ae auld hirplin deevil of apotter behoved just to step in my way, and offer me a pig (earthernpot--etym. dub.), as he said "just to put my Scotch ointment in;" and Igave him a push, as but natural, and the tottering deevil coupit owreamang his own pigs, and damaged a score of them.' So also Dandie Dinmontin the postchaise: ''Od! I hope they'll no coup us.'
_The Crans._ Idiomatic; root unknown to me, but it means in this use,full, total, and without recovery.
_Molendinar._ From 'molendinum,' the grinding-place. I do not know ifactually the local name,[173] or Scott's invention. Compare SirPiercie's 'Molinaras.' But at all events used here with bye-sense ofdegradation of the formerly idle saints to grind at the mill.
_Crouse._ Courageous, softened with a sense of comfort.
_Ilka._ Again a word with azure distance, including the whole sense of'each' and 'every.' The reader must carefully and reverently distinguishthese comprehensive words, which gather two or more perfectly understoodmeanings into one _chord_ of meaning, and are harmonies more than words,from the above-noted blunders between two half-hit meanings, struck as abad piano-player strikes the edge of another note. In English we havefewer of these combined thoughts; so that Shakespeare rather plays withthe distinct lights of his words, than melts them into one. So againBishop Douglas spells, and doubtless spoke, the word 'rose,'differently, according to his purpose; if as the chief or governingruler of flowers, 'rois,' but if only in her own beauty, rose.
_Christian-like._ The sense of the decency and order proper toChristianity is stronger in Scotland than in any other country, and theword 'Christian' more distinctly opposed to 'beast.' Hence theback-handed cut at the English for their over-pious care of dogs.
I am a little surprised myself at the length to which this examinationof one small piece of Sir Walter's first-rate work has carried us, buthere I must end for this time, trusting, if the Editor of the_Nineteenth Century_ permit me, yet to trespass, perhaps more than once,on his readers' patience; but, at all events, to examine in a followingpaper the technical characteristics of Scott's own style, both in proseand verse, together with Byron's, as opposed to our fashionably recentdialects and rhythms; the essential virtues of language, in both themasters of the old school, hinging ultimately, little as it might bethought, on certain unalterable views of theirs concerning the codecalled 'of the Ten Commandments,' wholly at variance with the dogmas ofautomatic morality which, summed again by the witches' line, 'Fair isfoul, and foul is fair,' hover through the fog and filthy air of ourprosperous England.
JOHN RUSKIN.
* * * * *
'_He hated greetings in the market-place_, and there were generallyloiterers in the streets to persecute him _either about the events ofthe day_, or about some petty pieces of business.'
These lines, which the reader will find near the beginning of thesixteenth chapter of the first volume of the _Antiquary_, contain twoindications of the old man's character, which, receiving the ideal ofhim as a portrait of Scott himself, are of extreme interest to me. Theymean essentially that neither Monkbarns nor Scott had any mind to becalled of men, Rabbi, in mere hearing of the mob; and especially thatthey hated to be drawn back out of their far-away thoughts, or forwardout of their long-ago thoughts, by any manner of 'daily' news, whetherprinted or gabbled. Of which two vital characteristics, deeper in boththe men, (for I must always speak of Scott's creations as if they wereas real as himself,) than any of their superficial vanities, or passingenthusiasms, I have to speak more at another time. I quote the passagejust now, because there was one piece of the daily news of the year 1815which did extremely interest Scott, and materially direct the labour ofthe latter part of his life; nor is there any piece of history in thiswhole nineteenth century quite so pregnant with various instruction asthe study of the reasons which influenced Scott and Byron in theiropposite views of the glories of the battle of Waterloo.
But I quote it for another reason also. The principal greeting which Mr.Oldbuck on this occasion receives in the market-place, being comparedwith the speech of Andrew Fairservice, examined in my first paper, willfurnish me with the text of what I have mainly to say in the presentone.
'"Mr. Oldbuck," said the town-clerk (a more important person, who camein front and ventured to stop the old gentleman), "the provost,understanding you were in town, begs on no account that you'll quit itwithout seeing him; he wants to speak to ye about bringing the waterfrae the Fairwell spring through a part o' your lands."
'"What the deuce!--have they nobody's land but mine to cut and carveon?--I won't consent, tell them."
'"And the provost," said the clerk, going on, without noticing therebuff, "and the council, wad be agreeable that you should hae the auldstanes at Donagild's Chapel, that ye was wussing to hae."
'"Eh?--what?--Oho! that's another story--Well, well, I'll call upon theprovost, and we'll talk about it."
'"But ye maun speak your mind on't forthwith, Monkbarns, if ye want thestanes; for Deacon Harlewalls thinks the carved through-stanes might beput with advantage on the front of the new council-house--that is, thetwa cross-legged figures that the callants used to ca' Robbin andBobbin, ane on ilka door-cheek; and the other stane, that they ca'dAilie Dailie, abune the door. It will be very tastefu', the Deacon says,and just in the style of modern Gothic."
'"Good Lord deliver me from this Gothic generation!" exclaimed theAntiquary,--"a monument of a knight-templar on each side of a Grecianporch, and a Madonna on the top of it!--_O crimini!_--Well, tell theprovost I wish to have the stones, and we'll not differ about thewater-course.--It's lucky I happened to come this way to-day."
'They parted mutually satisfied; but the wily clerk had most reason toexult in the dexterity he had displayed, since the whole proposal of anexchange between the monuments (which the council had determined toremove as a nuisance, because they encroached three feet upon the publicroad) and the privilege of conveying the water to the burgh, through theestate of Monkbarns, was an idea which had originated with himself uponthe pressure of the moment.'
In this single page of Scott, will the reader
please note the kind ofprophetic instinct with which the great men of every age mark andforecast its destinies? The water from the Fairwell is the futureThirlmere carried to Manchester; the 'auld stanes'[174] at Donagild'sChapel, removed as a _nuisance_, foretell the necessary view taken bymodern cockneyism, Liberalism, and progress, of all things that remindthem of the noble dead, of their father's fame, or of their own duty;and the public road becomes their idol, instead of the saint's shrine.Finally, the roguery of the entire transaction--the mean man seeing theweakness of the honourable, and 'besting' him--in modern slang, in themanner and at the pace of modern trade--'on the pressure of the moment.'
But neither are these things what I have at present quoted the passagefor.
I quote it, that we may consider how much wonderful and various historyis gathered in the fact, recorded for us in this piece of entirely fairfiction, that in the Scottish borough of Fairport, (Montrose, really,)in the year 17-- of Christ, the knowledge given by the pastors andteachers provided for its children by enlightened ScottishProtestantism, of their fathers' history, and the origin of theirreligion, had resulted in this substance and sum;--that the statues oftwo crusading knights had become, to their children, Robin and Bobbin;and the statue of the Madonna, Ailie Dailie.
A marvellous piece of history, truly: and far too comprehensive forgeneral comment here. Only one small piece of it I must carry forwardthe readers' thoughts upon.
The pastors and teachers aforesaid, (represented typically in anotherpart of this errorless book by Mr. Blattergowl) are not, whatever elsethey may have to answer for, answerable for these names. The names areof the children's own choosing and bestowing, but not of the children'sown inventing. 'Robin' is a classically endearing cognomen, recordingthe _errant_ heroism of old days--the name of the Bruce and of Rob Roy.'Bobbin' is a poetical and symmetrical fulfilment and adornment of theoriginal phrase. 'Ailie' is the last echo of 'Ave,' changed into thesoftest Scottish Christian name familiar to the children, itself thebeautiful feminine form of royal 'Louis;' the 'Dailie' againsymmetrically added for kinder and more musical endearment. The lastvestiges, you see, of honour for the heroism and religion of theirancestors, lingering on the lips of babes and sucklings.
But what is the meaning of this necessity the children find themselvesunder of completing the nomenclature rhythmically and rhymingly? Notefirst the difference carefully, and the attainment of both qualities bythe couplets in question. Rhythm is the syllabic and quantitativemeasure of the words, in which Robin, both in weight and time, balancesBobbin; and Dailie holds level scale with Ailie. But rhyme is the addedcorrespondence of sound; unknown and undesired, so far as we can learn,by the Greek Orpheus, but absolutely essential to, and, as specialvirtue, becoming titular of, the Scottish Thomas.
The 'Ryme,'[175] you may at first fancy, is the especially childish partof the work. Not so. It is the especially chivalric and Christian partof it. It characterises the Christian chant or canticle, as a higherthing than a Greek ode, melos, or hymnos, or than a Latin carmen.
Think of it, for this again is wonderful! That these children ofMontrose should have an element of music in their souls which Homer hadnot,--which a melos of David the Prophet and King had not,--whichOrpheus and Amphion had not,--which Apollo's unrymed oracles became muteat the sound of.
A strange new equity this,--melodious justice and judgment as itwere,--in all words spoken solemnly and ritualistically by Christianhuman creatures;--Robin and Bobbin--by the Crusader's tomb, up to 'Diesirae, dies illa,' at judgment of the crusading soul.
You have to understand this most deeply of all Christian minstrels, fromfirst to last; that they are more musical, because more joyful, than anyothers on earth: ethereal minstrels, pilgrims of the sky, true to thekindred points of heaven and home; their joy essentially the sky-lark's,in light, in purity; but, with their human eyes, looking for theglorious appearing of something in the sky, which the bird cannot.
This it is that changes Etruscan murmur into Terza rima--Horatian Latininto Provencal troubadour's melody; not, because less artful, less wise.
Here is a little bit, for instance, of French ryming just beforeChaucer's time--near enough to our own French to be intelligible to usyet.
'O quant tres-glorieuse vie, Quant cil quit out peut et maistrie, Veult esprouver pour necessaire, Ne pour quant il ne blasma mie La vie de Marthe sa mie: Mais il lui donna exemplaire D'autrement vivre, et de bien plaire A Dieu; et plut de bien a faire: Pour se conclut-il que Marie Qui estoit a ses piedz sans braire, Et pensait d'entendre et de taire, Estleut la plus saine partie.
La meilleur partie esleut-elle Et la plus saine et la plus belle, Qui ja ne luy sera ostee Car par verite se fut celle Qui fut tousjours fresche et nouvelle, D'aymer Dieu et d'en estre aymee; Car jusqu'au cueur fut entamee, Et si ardamment enflammee. Que tous-jours ardoit l'estincelle; Par quoi elle fut visitee Et de Dieu premier comfortee; Car charite est trop ysnelle.'
The only law of _metre_, observed in this song, is that each line shallbe octosyllabic:
Qui fut | tousjours | fresche et | nouvelle, D'autre | ment vi | vret de | bien (ben) plaire, Et pen | soit den | tendret | de taire
But the reader must note that words which were two-syllabled in Latinmostly remain yet so in the French.
La _vi_ | -_e_ de | Marthe | sa mie,
although _mie_, which is pet language, loving abbreviation of _amica_through _amie_, remains monosyllabic. But _vie_ elides its _e_ before avowel:
Car Mar- | the me | nait vie | active Et Ma- | ri-e | contemp | lative;
and custom endures many exceptions. Thus _Marie_ may be three-syllabledas above, or answer to _mie_ as a dissyllable; but _vierge_ is always, Ithink, dissyllabic, _vier-ge_, with even stronger accent on the -_ge_,for the Latin -_go_.
Then, secondly, of quantity, there is scarcely any fixed law. The metresmay be timed as the minstrel chooses--fast or slow--and the iambiccurrent checked in reverted eddy, as the words chance to come.
But, thirdly, there is to be rich ryming and chiming, no matter howsimply got, so only that the words jingle and tingle together with dueart of interlacing and answering in different parts of the stanza,correspondent to the involutions of tracery and illumination. The wholetwelve-line stanza is thus constructed with two rymes only, six of each,thus arranged:
AAB | AAB | BBA | BBA |
dividing the verse thus into four measures, reversed in ascent anddescent, or _descant_ more properly; and doubtless with correspondentphases in the voice-given, and duly accompanying, or following, music;Thomas the Rymer's own precept, that 'tong is chefe in mynstrelsye,'being always kept faithfully in mind.[176]
Here then you have a sufficient example of the pure chant of theChristian ages; which is always at heart joyful, and divides itself intothe four great forms, Song of Praise, Song of Prayer, Song of Love, andSong of Battle; praise, however, being the keynote of passion throughall the four forms; according to the first law which I have alreadygiven in the laws of Fesole; 'all great Art is Praise,' of which thecontrary is also true, all foul or miscreant Art is accusation, [Greek:diabole]: 'She gave me of the tree and I did eat' being an entirelymuseless expression on Adam's part, the briefly essential contrary ofLove-song.
With these four perfect forms of Christian chant, of which we may takefor pure examples the 'Te Deum,' the 'Te Lucis Ante,' the 'Amor chenella mente,'[177] and the 'Chant de Roland,' are mingled songs ofmourning, of Pagan origin (whether Greek or Danish), holding grasp stillof the races that have once learned them, in times of suffering andsorrow; and songs of Christian humiliation or grief, regarding chieflythe sufferings of Christ, or the conditions of our own sin: whilethrough the entire system of these musical complaints are interwovenmoralities, instructions, and related histories, in illustration ofboth, passing into Epic and Romantic verse, which gradually, as theforms and learnings of society increase, becomes less joyful, and moredidactic, or
satiric, until the last echoes of Christian joy and melodyvanish in the 'Vanity of human wishes.'
And here I must pause for a minute or two to separate the differentbranches of our inquiry clearly from one another. For one thing, thereader must please put for the present out of his head all thought ofthe progress of 'civilisation'--that is to say, broadly, of thesubstitution of wigs for hair, gas for candles, and steam for legs. Thisis an entirely distinct matter from the phases of policy and religion.It has nothing to do with the British Constitution, or the FrenchRevolution, or the unification of Italy. There are, indeed, certainsubtle relations between the state of mind, for instance, in Venice,which makes her prefer a steamer to a gondola, and that which makes herprefer a gazetteer to a duke; but these relations are not at all to bedealt with until we solemnly understand that whether men shall beChristians and poets, or infidels and dunces, does not depend on the waythey cut their hair, tie their breeches, or light their fires. Dr.Johnson might have worn his wig in fulness conforming to his dignity,without therefore coming to the conclusion that human wishes were vain;nor is Queen Antoinette's civilised hair-powder, as opposed to QueenBertha's savagely loose hair, the cause of Antoinette's laying her headat last in scaffold dust, but Bertha in a pilgrim-haunted tomb.
Again, I have just now used the words 'poet' and 'dunce,' meaning thedegree of each quality possible to average human nature. Men areeternally divided into the two classes of poet (believer, maker, andpraiser) and dunce (or unbeliever, unmaker, and dispraiser). And inprocess of ages they have the power of making faithful and formativecreatures of themselves, or unfaithful and _de_formative. And thisdistinction between the creatures who, blessing, are blessed, andevermore _benedicti_, and the creatures who, cursing, are cursed, andevermore _maledicti_, is one going through all humanity; antediluvian inCain and Abel, diluvian in Ham and Shem. And the question for the publicof any given period is not whether they are a constitutional orunconstitutional vulgus, but whether they are a benignant or malignantvulgus. So also, whether it is indeed the gods who have given anygentleman the grace to despise the rabble, depends wholly on whether itis indeed the rabble, or he, who are the malignant persons.
But yet again. This difference between the persons to whom Heaven,according to Orpheus, has granted 'the hour of delight,'[178] and thosewhom it has condemned to the hour of detestableness, being, as I havejust said, of all times and nations,--it is an interior and moredelicate difference which we are examining in the gift of _Christian_,as distinguished from unchristian, song. Orpheus, Pindar, and Horace areindeed distinct from the prosaic rabble, as the bird from the snake; butbetween Orpheus and Palestrina, Horace and Sidney, there is anotherdivision, and a new power of music and song given to the humanity whichhas hope of the Resurrection.
_This_ is the root of all life and all rightness in Christian harmony,whether of word or instrument; and so literally, that in precise manneras this hope disappears, the power of song is taken away, and taken awayutterly. When the Christian falls back out of the bright hope of theResurrection, even the Orpheus song is forbidden him. Not to have knownthe hope is blameless: one may sing, unknowing, as the swan, orPhilomela. But to have known and fall away from it, and to declare thatthe human wishes, which are summed in that one--'Thy kingdom come'--arevain! The Fates ordain there shall be no singing after that denial.
For observe this, and earnestly. The old Orphic song, with its dim hopeof yet once more Eurydice,--the Philomela song--granted after the cruelsilence,--the Halcyon song--with its fifteen days of peace, were allsad, or joyful only in some vague vision of conquest over death. But theJohnsonian vanity of wishes is on the whole satisfactory toJohnson--accepted with gentlemanly resignation by Pope--triumphantly andwith bray of penny trumpets and blowing of steam-whistles, proclaimedfor the glorious discovery of the civilised ages, by Mrs. Barbauld, MissEdgeworth, Adam Smith, and Co. There is no God, but have we notinvented gunpowder?--who wants a God, with that in his pocket?[179]There is no Resurrection, neither angel nor spirit; but have we notpaper and pens, and cannot every blockhead print his opinions, and theDay of Judgment become Republican, with everybody for a judge, and theflat of the universe for the throne? There is no law, but onlygravitation and congelation, and we are stuck together in an everlastinghail, and melted together in everlasting mud, and great was the day inwhich our worships were born. And there is no Gospel, but only, whateverwe've got, to get more, and, wherever we are, to go somewhere else. Andare not these discoveries, to be sung of, and drummed of, and fiddledof, and generally made melodiously indubitable in the eighteenth centurysong of praise?
The Fates will not have it so. No word of song is possible, in thatcentury, to mortal lips. Only polished versification, sententiouspentameter and hexameter, until, having turned out its toes long enoughwithout dancing, and pattered with its lips long enough without piping,suddenly Astraea returns to the earth, and a Day of Judgment of a sort,and there bursts out a song at last again, a most curtly melodioustriplet of Amphisbaenic ryme. '_Ca ira._'
Amphisbaenic, fanged in each ryme with fire, and obeying Ercildoune'sprecept, 'Tong is chefe of mynstrelsye,' to the syllable.--DonGiovanni's hitherto fondly chanted 'Andiam, andiam,' become suddenlyimpersonal and prophetic: IT shall go, and you also. A cry--before it isa song, then song and accompaniment together--perfectly done; and themarch 'towards the field of Mars. The two hundred and fiftythousand--they to the sound of stringed music--preceded by young girlswith tricolor streamers, they have shouldered soldier-wise their shovelsand picks, and with one throat are singing _Ca ira_.'[180]
Through all the springtime of 1790, 'from Brittany to Burgundy, on mostplains of France, under most city walls, there march andconstitutionally wheel to the Ca-iraing mood of fife and drum--our clearglancing phalanxes;--the song of the two hundred and fifty thousand,virgin led, is in the long light of July.' Nevertheless, another song isyet needed, for phalanx, and for maid. For, two springs and summershaving gone--amphisbaenic,--on the 28th of August 1792, 'Dumouriez rodefrom the camp of Maulde, eastwards to _Sedan_.'[181]
And Longwi has fallen basely, and Brunswick and the Prussian king willbeleaguer Verdun, and Clairfait and the Austrians press deeper in overthe northern marches, Cimmerian Europe behind. And on that same nightDumouriez assembles council of war at his lodgings in Sedan. Prussianshere, Austrians there, triumphant both. With broad highway to Paris andlittle hindrance--_we_ scattered, helpless here and there--what toadvise? The generals advise retreating, and retreating till Paris besacked at the latest day possible. Dumouriez, silent, dismisses_them_,--keeps only, with a sign, Thouvenot. Silent, thus, when needful,yet having voice, it appears, of what musicians call tenor-quality, of arare kind. Rubini-esque, even, but scarcely producible to fastidiousears at opera. The seizure of the forest of Argonne follows--thecannonade of Valmy. The Prussians do not march on Paris _this_ time, theautumnal hours of fate pass on--_ca ira_--and on the 6th of November,Dumouriez meets the Austrians also. 'Dumouriez wide-winged, theywide-winged--at and around Jemappes, its green heights fringed and manedwith red fire. And Dumouriez is swept back on this wing and swept backon that, and is like to be swept back utterly, when he rushes up inperson, speaks a prompt word or two, and then, with clear tenor-pipe,uplifts the hymn of the Marseillaise, ten thousand tenor or bass pipesjoining, or say some forty thousand in all, for every heart leaps up atthe sound; and so, with rhythmic march melody, they rally, they advance,they rush death-defying, and like the fire whirlwind sweep all manner ofAustrians from the scene of action.' Thus, through the lips ofDumouriez, sings Tyrtaeus, Rouget de Lisle,[182] 'Aux armes--marchons!'Iambic measure with a witness! in what wide strophe here beginning--inwhat unthought-of antistrophe returning to that council chamber inSedan!
While these two great songs were thus being composed, and sung, anddanced to in cometary cycle, by the French nation, here in our lessgiddy island there rose, amidst hours of business in Scotland and ofidleness in England, three troubadours of quite different temper.Different also th
emselves, but not opponent; forming a perfect chord,and adverse all the three of them alike to the French musicians, in thismain point--that while the _Ca ira_ and Marseillaise were essentiallysongs of blame and wrath, the British bards wrote, virtually, alwayssongs of praise, though by no means psalmody in the ancient keys. On thecontrary, all the three are alike moved by a singular antipathy to thepriests, and are pointed at with fear and indignation by the pietists,of their day;--not without latent cause. For they are all of them, withthe most loving service, servants of that world which the Puritan andmonk alike despised; and, in the triple chord of their song, could notbut appear to the religious persons around them as respectively andspecifically the praisers--Scott of the world, Burns of the flesh, andByron of the devil.
To contend with this carnal orchestra, the religious world, having longago rejected its Catholic Psalms as antiquated and unscientific, andfinding its Puritan melodies sunk into faint jar and twangle from theirnative trumpet-tone, had nothing to oppose but the innocent, rather thanreligious, verses of the school recognised as that of the EnglishLakes; very creditable to them; domestic at once and refined; observingthe errors of the world outside of the Lakes with a pitying and tenderindignation, and arriving in lacustrine seclusion at many valuableprinciples of philosophy, as pure as the tarns of their mountains, andof corresponding depth.[183]
I have lately seen, and with extreme pleasure, Mr. Matthew Arnold'sarrangement of Wordsworth's poems; and read with sincere interest hishigh estimate of them. But a great poet's work never needs arrangementby other hands; and though it is very proper that Silver How shouldclearly understand and brightly praise its fraternal Rydal Mount, wemust not forget that, over yonder, are the Andes, all the while.
Wordsworth's rank and scale among poets were determined by himself, in asingle exclamation:--
'What was the great Parnassus' self to thee, Mount Skiddaw?'
Answer his question faithfully, and you have the relation between thegreat masters of the Muse's teaching, and the pleasant fingerer of hispastoral flute among the reeds of Rydal.
Wordsworth is simply a Westmoreland peasant, with considerably lessshrewdness than most border Englishmen or Scotsmen inherit; and no senseof humour: but gifted (in this singularly) with vivid sense of naturalbeauty, and a pretty turn for reflections, not always acute, but, as faras they reach, medicinal to the fever of the restless and corrupted lifearound him. Water to parched lips may be better than Samian wine, but donot let us therefore confuse the qualities of wine and water. I muchdoubt there being many inglorious Miltons in our country churchyards;but I am very sure there are many Wordsworths resting there, who wereinferior to the renowned one only in caring less to hear themselvestalk.
With an honest and kindly heart, a stimulating egoism, a wholesomecontentment in modest circumstances, and such sufficient ease, in thataccepted state, as permitted the passing of a good deal of time inwishing that daisies could see the beauty of their own shadows, andother such profitable mental exercises, Wordsworth has left us a seriesof studies of the graceful and happy shepherd life of our lake country,which to me personally, for one, are entirely sweet and precious; butthey are only so as the mirror of an existent reality in many ways morebeautiful than its picture.
But the other day I went for an afternoon's rest into the cottage of oneof our country people of old statesman class; cottage lying nearlymidway between two village churches, but more conveniently for downhillwalk towards one than the other. I found, as the good housewife made teafor me, that nevertheless she went up the hill to church. 'Why do notyou go to the nearer church?' I asked. 'Don't you like the clergyman?''Oh no, sir,' she answered, 'it isn't that; but you know I couldn'tleave my mother.' 'Your mother! she is buried at H---- then?' 'Yes, sir;and you know I couldn't go to church anywhere else.'
That feelings such as these existed among the peasants, not ofCumberland only, but of all the tender earth that gives forth her fruitfor the living, and receives her dead to peace, might perhaps have been,to our great and endless comfort, discovered before now, if Wordsworthhad been content to tell us what he knew of his own villages and people,not as the leader of a new and only correct school of poetry, but simplyas a country gentleman of sense and feeling, fond of primroses, kind tothe parish children, and reverent of the spade with which Wilkinson hadtilled his lands: and I am by no means sure that his influence on thestronger minds of his time was anywise hastened or extended by thespirit of tunefulness under whose guidance he discovered that heavenrhymed to seven, and Foy to boy.
Tuneful nevertheless at heart, and of the heavenly choir, I gladly andfrankly acknowledge him; and our English literature enriched with a newand a singular virtue in the aerial purity and healthful rightness ofhis quiet song;--but _aerial_ only,--not ethereal; and lowly in itsprivacy of light.
A measured mind, and calm; innocent, unrepentant; helpful to sinlesscreatures and scatheless, such of the flock as do not stray. Hopeful atleast, if not faithful; content with intimations of immortality such asmay be in skipping of lambs, and laughter of children,--incurious to seein the hands the print of the Nails.
A gracious and constant mind; as the herbage of its native hills,fragrant and pure;--yet, to the sweep and the shadow, the stress anddistress, of the greater souls of men, as the tufted thyme to the laurelwilderness of Tempe,--as the gleaming euphrasy to the dark branches ofDodona.
* * * * *
[I am obliged to defer the main body of this paper to nextmonth,--revises penetrating all too late into my lacustrine seclusion;as chanced also unluckily with the preceding paper, in which the readerwill perhaps kindly correct the consequent misprints, p. 29, l. 20, of'scarcely' to 'securely,' and p. 31, l. 34, 'full,' with comma, to'fall,' without one; noticing besides that _Redgauntlet_ has beenomitted in the italicised list, p. 25, l. 16; and that the reference tonote 2 should not be at the word 'imagination,' p. 24, but at the word'trade,' p. 25, l. 7. My dear old friend, Dr. John Brown, sends me, fromJamieson's _Dictionary_, the following satisfactory end to one of mydifficulties:--'Coup the crans.' The language is borrowed from the'cran,' or trivet on which small pots are placed in cookery, which issometimes turned with its feet uppermost by an awkward assistant. Thusit signifies to be _completely_ upset.]
JOHN RUSKIN.
[BYRON.]
'Parching summer hath no warrant To consume this crystal well; Rains, that make each brook a torrent, Neither sully it, nor swell.'
So was it, year by year, among the unthought-of hills. Little Duddon andchild Rotha ran clear and glad; and laughed from ledge to pool, andopened from pool to mere, translucent, through endless days of peace.
But eastward, between her orchard plains, Loire locked her embracingdead in silent sands; dark with blood rolled Iser; glacial-pale,Beresina-Lethe, by whose shore the weary hearts forgot their people, andtheir father's house.
Nor unsullied, Tiber; nor unswoln, Arno and Aufidus; and Euroclydon highon Helle's wave; meantime, let our happy piety glorify the garden rockswith snowdrop circlet, and breathe the spirit of Paradise, where life iswise and innocent.
Maps many have we, now-a-days clear in display of earth constituent, aircurrent, and ocean tide. Shall we ever engrave the map of meanerresearch, whose shadings shall content themselves in the task of showingthe depth, or drought,--the calm, or trouble, of Human Compassion?
For this is indeed all that is noble in the life of Man, and the sourceof all that is noble in the speech of Man. Had it narrowed itself then,in those days, out of all the world, into this peninsula betweenCockermouth and Shap?
Not altogether so; but indeed the _Vocal_ piety seemed conclusively tohave retired (or excursed?) into that mossy hermitage, above LittleLangdale. The _Un_vocal piety, with the uncomplaining sorrow, of Man,may have had a somewhat wider range, for aught we know: but historydisregards those items; and of firmly proclaimed and sweetly canorousreligion, there really seemed at that juncture none to be reckoned upon,east
of Ingleborough, or north of Criffel. Only under Furness Fells, orby Bolton Priory, it seems we can still write Ecclesiastical Sonnets,stanzas on the force of Prayer, Odes to Duty, and complimentaryaddresses to the Deity upon His endurance for adoration. Far otherwise,over yonder, by Spezzia Bay, and Ravenna Pineta, and in ravines ofHartz. There, the softest voices speak the wildest words; and Keatsdiscourses of Endymion, Shelley of Demogorgon, Goethe of Lucifer, andBuerger of the Resurrection of Death unto Death--while even PuritanScotland and Episcopal Anglia produce for us only these three minstrelsof doubtful tone, who show but small respect for the 'unco guid,' putbut limited faith in gifted Gilfillan, and translate with unflinchingfrankness the _Morgante Maggiore_.[184]
Dismal the aspect of the spiritual world, or at least the sound of it,might well seem to the eyes and ears of Saints (such as we had) of theperiod--dismal in angels' eyes also assuredly! Yet is it possible thatthe dismalness in angelic sight may be otherwise quartered, as it were,from the way of mortal heraldry; and that seen, and heard, ofangels,--again I say--hesitatingly--_is_ it possible that the goodnessof the Unco Guid, and the gift of Gilfillan, and the word of Mr.Blattergowl, may severally not have been the goodness of God, the giftof God, nor the word of God: but that in the much blotted and brokenefforts at goodness, and in the careless gift which they themselvesdespised,[185] and in the sweet ryme and murmur of their unpurposedwords, the Spirit of the Lord had, indeed, wandering, as in chaos dayson lightless waters, gone forth in the hearts and from the lips of thoseother three strange prophets, even though they ate forbidden bread bythe altar of the poured-out ashes, and even though the wild beast of thedesert found them, and slew.
This, at least, I know, that it had been well for England, though allher other prophets, of the Press, the Parliament, the Doctor's chair,and the Bishop's throne, had fallen silent; so only that she had beenable to understand with her heart here and there the simplest line ofthese, her despised.
I take one at mere chance:
'Who thinks of self, when gazing on the sky?'[186]
Well, I don't know; Mr. Wordsworth certainly did, and observed, withtruth, that its clouds took a sober colouring in consequence of hisexperiences. It is much if, indeed, this sadness be unselfish, and oureyes _have_ kept loving watch o'er Man's Mortality. I have found itdifficult to make any one now-a-days believe that such sobriety can be;and that Turner saw deeper crimson than others in the clouds of Goldau.But that any should yet think the clouds brightened by Man's_Im_mortality instead of dulled by his death,--and, gazing on the sky,look for the day when every eye must gaze also--for behold, He comethwith the clouds--this it is no more possible for Christian England toapprehend, however exhorted by her gifted and guid.
'But Byron was not thinking of such things!'--He, the reprobate! howshould such as he think of Christ?
Perhaps not wholly as you or I think of Him. Take, at chance, anotherline or two, to try:
'Carnage (so Wordsworth tells you) is God's daughter;[187] If _he_ speak truth, she is Christ's sister, and Just now, behaved as in the Holy Land.'
Blasphemy, cry you, good reader? Are you sure you understand it? Thefirst line I gave you was easy Byron--almost shallow Byron--these are ofthe man in his depth, and you will not fathom them, like a tarn,--nor ina hurry.
'Just now behaved as in the Holy Land.' How _did_ Carnage behave in theHoly Land then? You have all been greatly questioning, of late, whetherthe sun, which you find to be now going out, ever stood still. Did youin any lagging minute, on those scientific occasions, chance to reflectwhat he was bid stand still _for_? or if not--will you please look--andwhat, also, going forth again as a strong man to run his course, he saw,rejoicing?
'Then Joshua passed from Makkedah unto Libnah--and fought againstLibnah. And the Lord delivered it and the king thereof into the hand ofIsrael, and he smote it with the edge of the sword, and all the soulsthat were therein.' And from Lachish to Eglon, and from Eglon toKirjath-Arba, and Sarah's grave in the Amorites' land, 'and Joshua smoteall the country of the hills and of the south--and of the vale and ofthe springs, and all their kings; he left none remaining, but utterlydestroyed all that breathed--as the Lord God of Israel commanded.'
Thus 'it is written:' though you perhaps do not so often hear _these_texts preached from, as certain others about taking away the sins of theworld. I wonder how the world would like to part with them! hitherto ithas always preferred parting first with its Life--and God has taken itat its word. But Death is not _His_ Begotten Son, for all that; nor isthe death of the innocent in battle carnage His 'instrument for workingout a pure intent' as Mr. Wordsworth puts it; but Man's instrument forworking out an impure one, as Byron would have you to know. Theologyperhaps less orthodox, but certainly more reverent;--neither is theWoolwich Infant a Child of God; neither does the iron-clad 'Thunderer'utter thunders of God--which facts, if you had had the grace or sense tolearn from Byron, instead of accusing him of blasphemy, it had beenbetter at this day for _you_, and for many a savage soul also, by Euxineshore, and in Zulu and Afghan lands.
It was neither, however, for the theology, nor the use, of these linesthat I quoted them; but to note this main point of Byron's owncharacter. He was the first great Englishman who felt the cruelty ofwar, and, in its cruelty, the shame. Its guilt had been known to GeorgeFox--its folly shown practically by Penn. But the _compassion_ of thepious world had still for the most part been shown only in keeping itsstock of Barabbases unhanged if possible: and, till Byron came, neitherKunersdorf, Eylau, nor Waterloo, had taught the pity and the pride ofmen that
'The drying up a single tear has more Of honest fame than shedding seas of gore.'[188]
Such pacific verse would not indeed have been acceptable to theEdinburgh volunteers on Portobello sands. But Byron can write a battlesong too, when it is _his_ cue to fight. If you look at the introductionto the _Isles of Greece_, namely the 85th and 86th stanzas of the 3rdcanto of _Don Juan_,--you will find--what will you _not_ find, if onlyyou understand them! 'He' in the first line, remember, means the typicalmodern poet.
'Thus usually, when he was asked to sing, He gave the different nations something national. 'Twas all the same to him--"God save the King" Or "Ca ira" according to the fashion all; His muse made increment of anything From the high lyric down to the low rational: If Pindar sang horse races, what should hinder Himself from being as pliable as Pindar?
'In France, for instance, he would write a chanson; In England a six-canto quarto tale; In Spain, he'd make a ballad or romance on The last war--much the same in Portugal; In Germany, the Pegasus he'd prance on Would be old Goethe's--(see what says de Stael) In Italy he'd ape the 'Trecentisti;' In Greece, he'd sing some sort of hymn like this t' ye.
Note first here, as we did in Scott, the concentrating and foretellingpower. The 'God Save the Queen' in England, fallen hollow now, as the'Ca ira' in France--not a man in France knowing where either France or'that' (whatever 'that' may be) is going to; nor the Queen of Englanddaring, for her life, to ask the tiniest Englishman to do a single thinghe doesn't like;--nor any salvation, either of Queen or Realm, being anymore possible to God, unless under the direction of the Royal Society:then, note the estimate of height and depth in poetry, swept in aninstant, 'high lyric to low rational.' Pindar to Pope (knowing Pope'sheight, too, all the while, no man better); then, the poetic power ofFrance--resumed in a word--Beranger; then the cut at Marmion, entirelydeserved, as we shall see, yet kindly given, for everything he names inthese two stanzas is the best of its kind; then Romance in Spain on--the_last_ war, (_present_ war not being to Spanish poetical taste), then,Goethe the real heart of all Germany, and last, the aping of theTrecentisti which has since consummated itself in Pre-Raphaelitism! thatalso being the best thing Italy has done through England, whether inRossetti's 'blessed damozels' or Burne Jones's 'days of creation.'Lastly comes the mock at himself--the modern English Greek--(followed upby the 'degenerate into hands
like mine' in the song itself); andthen--to amazement, forth he thunders in his Achilles voice. We have hadone line of him in his clearness--five of him in his depth--sixteen ofhim in his play. Hear now but these, out of his whole heart:--
'What,--silent yet? and silent _all_? Ah no, the voices of the dead Sound like a distant torrent's fall, And answer, "Let _one_ living head, But one, arise--we come--we come:" --'Tis but the living who are dumb.'
Resurrection, this, you see like Buerger's; but not of death unto death.
'Sound like a distant torrent's fall.' I said the _whole_ heart of Byronwas in this passage. First its compassion, then its indignation, and thethird element, not yet examined, that love of the beauty of this worldin which the three--unholy--children, of its Fiery Furnace were like toeach other; but Byron the widest-hearted. Scott and Burns love Scotlandmore than Nature itself: for Burns the moon must rise over CumnockHills,--for Scott, the Rymer's glen divide the Eildons; but, for Byron,Loch-na-Gar _with Ida_, looks o'er Troy, and the soft murmurs of the Deeand the Bruar change into voices of the dead on distant Marathon.
Yet take the parallel from Scott, by a field of homelier rest:--
'And silence aids--though the steep hills Send to the lake a thousand rills; In summer tide, so soft they weep, The sound but lulls the ear asleep; Your horse's hoof-tread sounds too rude, So stilly is the solitude.
Naught living meets the eye or ear, But well I ween the dead are near; For though, in feudal strife, a foe Hath laid our Lady's Chapel low, Yet still beneath the hallowed soil, The peasant rests him from his toil, And, dying, bids his bones be laid Where erst his simple fathers prayed.'
And last take the same note of sorrow--with Burns's finger on the fallof it:
'Mourn, ilka grove the cushat kens, Ye hazly shaws and briery dens, Ye burnies, wimplin' down your glens Wi' toddlin' din, Or foamin' strang wi' hasty stens Frae lin to lin.'
As you read, one after another, these fragments of chant by the greatmasters, does not a sense come upon you of some element in theirpassion, no less than in their sound, different, specifically, from thatof 'Parching summer hath no warrant'? Is it more profane, think you--ormore tender--nay, perhaps, in the core of it, more true?
For instance, when we are told that
'Wharfe, as he moved along, To matins joined a mournful voice,'
is this disposition of the river's mind to pensive psalmody quitelogically accounted for by the previous statement (itself by no meansrhythmically dulcet,) that
'The boy is in the arms of Wharfe, And strangled by a merciless force'?
Or, when we are led into the improving reflection,
'How sweet were leisure, could it yield no more Then 'mid this wave-washed churchyard to recline, From pastoral graves extracting thoughts divine!'
--is the divinity of the extract assured to us by its being made atleisure, and in a reclining attitude--as compared with the meditationsof otherwise active men, in an erect one? Or are we perchance, many ofus, still erring somewhat in our notions alike of Divinity andHumanity,--poetical extraction, and moral position?
On the chance of its being so, might I ask hearing for just a few wordsmore of the school of Belial?
Their occasion, it must be confessed, is a quite unjustifiable one. Somevery wicked people--mutineers, in fact--have retired, misanthropically,into an unfrequented part of the country, and there find themselvessafe, indeed, but extremely thirsty. Whereupon Byron thus gives them todrink:
'A little stream came tumbling from the height And straggling into ocean as it might. Its bounding crystal frolicked in the ray And gushed from cliff to crag with saltless spray, Close on the wild wide ocean,--yet as pure And fresh as Innocence; and more secure. Its silver torrent glittered o'er the deep As the shy chamois' eye o'erlooks the steep, While, far below, the vast and sullen swell Of ocean's Alpine azure rose and fell.'[189]
Now, I beg, with such authority as an old workman may take concerninghis trade, having also looked at a waterfall or two in my time, and notunfrequently at a wave, to assure the reader that here _is_ entirelyfirst-rate literary work. Though Lucifer himself had written it, thething is itself good, and not only so, but unsurpassably good, theclosing line being probably the best concerning the sea yet written bythe race of the sea-kings.
But Lucifer himself _could_ not have written it; neither any servant ofLucifer. I do not doubt but that most readers were surprised at mysaying, in the close of my first paper, that Byron's 'style' depended inany wise on his views respecting the Ten Commandments. That soall-important a thing as 'style' should depend in the least upon soridiculous a thing as moral sense: or that Allegra's father, watchingher drive by in Count G.'s coach and six, had any remnant of soridiculous a thing to guide,--or check,--his poetical passion, may alikeseem more than questionable to the liberal and chaste philosophy of theexisting British public. But, first of all, putting the question of whowrites, or speaks, aside, do you, good reader, _know_ good 'style' whenyou get it? Can you say, of half-a-dozen given lines taken anywhere outof a novel, or poem, or play, That is good, essentially, in style, orbad, essentially? and can you say why such half-dozen lines are good, orbad?
I imagine that in most cases, the reply would be given with hesitation,yet if you will give me a little patience, and take some accurate pains,I can show you the main tests of style in the space of a couple ofpages.
I take two examples of absolutely perfect, and in manner highest, _i.e._ kingly, and heroic, style: the first example in expression of anger,the second of love.
(1) 'We are glad the Dauphin is so pleasant with us, His present, and your pains, we thank you for. When we have match'd our rackets to these balls, We will in France, by God's grace, play a set, Shall strike his father's crown into the hazard.'
(2) 'My gracious Silence, hail! Would'st thou have laughed, had I come coffin'd home That weep'st to see me triumph? Ah, my dear, Such eyes the widows in Corioli wear, And mothers that lack sons.'
Let us note, point by point, the conditions of greatness common to boththese passages, so opposite in temper.
A. Absolute command over all passion, however intense; this thefirst-of-first conditions, (see the King's own sentence just before, 'Weare no tyrant, but a Christian King, Unto _whose grace_ our passion isas subject As are our wretches fettered in our prisons'); and with thisself-command, the supremely surveying grasp of every thought that is tobe uttered, before its utterance; so that each may come in its exactplace, time, and connection. The slightest hurry, the misplacing of aword, or the unnecessary accent on a syllable, would destroy the 'style'in an instant.
B. Choice of the fewest and simplest words that can be found in thecompass of the language, to express the thing meant: these few wordsbeing also arranged in the most straightforward and intelligible way;allowing inversion only when the subject can be made primary withoutobscurity; thus, 'his present, and your pains, we thank you for' isbetter than 'we thank you for his present and your pains,' because theDauphin's gift is by courtesy put before the Ambassador's pains; but'when to these balls our rackets we have matched' would have spoiled thestyle in a moment, because--I was going to have said, ball and racketare of equal rank, and therefore only the natural order proper; but alsohere the natural order is the desired one, the English racket to haveprecedence of the French ball. In the fourth line the 'in France' comesfirst, as announcing the most important resolution of action; the 'byGod's grace' next, as the only condition rendering resolution possible;the detail of issue follows with the strictest limit in the final word.The King does not say 'danger,' far less 'dishonour,' but 'hazard' only;of _that_ he is, humanly speaking, sure.
C. Perfectly emphatic and clear utterance of the chosen words; slowlyin the degree of their importance, with omiss
ion however of every wordnot absolutely required; and natural use of the familiar contractions offinal dissyllable. Thus, 'play a set shall strike' is better than 'playa set _that_ shall strike,' and 'match'd' is kingly short--no necessitycould have excused 'matched' instead. On the contrary, the three firstwords, 'We are glad,' would have been spoken by the king more slowly andfully than any other syllables in the whole passage, first pronouncingthe kingly 'we' at its proudest, and then the 'are' as a continuousstate, and then the 'glad,' as the exact contrary of what theambassadors expected him to be.[190]
D. Absolute spontaneity in doing all this, easily and necessarily as theheart beats. The king _cannot_ speak otherwise than he does--nor thehero. The words not merely come to them, but are compelled to them. Evenlisping numbers 'come,' but mighty numbers are ordained, and inspired.
E. Melody in the words, changeable with their passion fitted to itexactly and the utmost of which the language is capable--the melody inprose being Eolian and variable--in verse, nobler by submitting itselfto stricter law. I will enlarge upon this point presently.
F. Utmost spiritual contents in the words; so that each carries not onlyits instant meaning, but a cloudy companionship of higher or darkermeaning according to the passion--nearly always indicated by metaphor:'play a set'--sometimes by abstraction--(thus in the second passage'silence' for silent one) sometimes by description instead of directepithet ('coffined' for dead) but always indicative of there being morein the speaker's mind than he has said, or than he can say, full thoughhis saying be. On the quantity of this attendant fulness depends themajesty of style; that is to say, virtually, on the quantity ofcontained thought in briefest words, such thought being primarily lovingand true: and this the sum of all--that nothing can be well said, butwith truth, nor beautifully, but by love.
These are the essential conditions of noble speech in prose and versealike, but the adoption of the form of verse, and especially rymedverse, means the addition to all these qualities of one more; of music,that is to say, not Eolian merely, but Apolline; a construction orarchitecture of words fitted and befitting, under external laws of timeand harmony.
When Byron says 'rhyme is of the rude,'[191] he means that Burns needsit,--while Henry the Fifth does not, nor Plato, nor Isaiah--yet in thisneed of it by the simple, it becomes all the more religious: and thusthe loveliest pieces of Christian language are all in ryme--the best ofDante, Chaucer, Douglas, Shakespeare, Spenser, and Sidney.
I am not now able to keep abreast with the tide of modern scholarship;(nor, to say the truth, do I make the effort, the first edge of itswaves being mostly muddy, and apt to make a shallow sweep of the shorerefuse:) so that I have no better book of reference by me than theconfused essay on the antiquity of ryme at the end of Turner's_Anglo-Saxons_. I cannot however conceive a more interesting piece ofwork, if not yet done, than the collection of sifted earliest fragmentsknown of rymed song in European languages. Of Eastern I know nothing;but, this side Hellespont, the substance of the matter is all given inKing Canute's impromptu
'Gaily (or is it sweetly?--I forget which, and it's no matter) sang the monks of Ely, As Knut the king came sailing by;'
much to be noted by any who make their religion lugubrious, and theirSunday the eclipse of the week. And observe further, that if Milton doesnot ryme, it is because his faculty of Song was concerning Loss,chiefly; and he has little more than faculty of Croak, concerning Gain;while Dante, though modern readers never go further with him than intothe Pit, is stayed only by Casella in the ascent to the Rose of Heaven.So, Gibbon can write in _his_ manner the Fall of Rome; but Virgil, in_his_ manner, the rise of it; and finally Douglas, in _his_ manner,bursts into such rymed passion of praise both of Rome and Virgil, asbefits a Christian Bishop, and a good subject of the Holy See.
'Master of Masters--sweet source, and springing well, Wide where over all ringes thy heavenly bell;
* * * *
Why should I then with dull forehead and vain, With rude ingene, and barane, emptive brain, With bad harsh speech, and lewit barbare tongue Presume to write, where thy sweet bell is rung, Or counterfeit thy precious wordis dear? Na, na--not so; but kneel when I them hear. But farther more--and lower to descend Forgive me, Virgil, if I thee offend Pardon thy scolar, suffer him to ryme Since _thou_ wast but ane mortal man sometime.'
'Before honour is humility.' Does not clearer light come for you on thatlaw after reading these nobly pious words? And note you _whose_humility? How is it that the sound of the bell comes so instinctivelyinto his chiming verse? This gentle singer is the son of--ArchibaldBell-the-Cat!
And now perhaps you can read with right sympathy the scene in _Marmion_between his father and King James.
'His hand the monarch sudden took-- Now, by the Bruce's soul, Angus, my hasty speech forgive, For sure as doth his spirit live As he said of the Douglas old I well may say of you,-- That never king did subject hold, In speech more free, in war more bold, More tender and more true: And while the king his hand did strain The old man's tears fell down like rain.'
I believe the most infidel of scholastic readers can scarcely butperceive the relation between the sweetness, simplicity, and melody ofexpression in these passages, and the gentleness of the passions theyexpress, while men who are not scholastic, and yet are true scholars,will recognise further in them that the simplicity of the educated islovelier than the simplicity of the rude. Hear next a piece of Spenser'steaching how rudeness itself may become more beautiful even by itsmistakes, if the mistakes are made lovingly.
'Ye shepherds' daughters that dwell on the green, Hye you there apace; Let none come there but that virgins been To adorn her grace: And when you come, whereas she in place, See that your rudeness do not you disgrace; Bind your fillets fast, And gird in your waste, For more fineness, with a taudry lace.'
'Bring hither the pink and purple cullumbine With gylliflowers; Bring coronations, and sops in wine, Worn of paramours; Strow me the ground with daffadowndillies And cowslips, and kingcups, and loved lilies; The pretty paunce And the chevisaunce Shall match with the fair flowre-delice.'[192]
Two short pieces more only of master song, and we have enough to testall by.
(2) 'No more, no more, since thou art dead, Shall we e'er bring coy brides to bed, No more, at yearly festivals, We cowslip balls Or chains of columbines shall make, For this or that occasion's sake. No, no! our maiden pleasures be Wrapt in thy winding-sheet with thee.'[193]
(3) 'Death is now the phoenix rest, And the turtle's loyal breast To eternity doth rest. Truth may seem, but cannot be; Beauty brag, but 'tis not she: Truth and beauty buried be.'[194]
If now, with the echo of these perfect verses in your mind, you turn toByron, and glance over, or recall to memory, enough of him to give meansof exact comparison, you will, or should, recognise these followingkinds of mischief in him. First, if any one offends him--as for instanceMr. Southey, or Lord Elgin--'his manners have not that repose that marksthe caste,' &c. _This_ defect in his Lordship's style, being myselfscrupulously and even painfully reserved in the use of vituperativelanguage, I need not say how deeply I deplore.[195]
Secondly. In the best and most violet-bedded bits of his work there isyet, as compared with Elizabethan and earlier verse, a strange taint;and indefinable--evening flavour of Covent Garden, as it were;--not tosay, escape of gas in the Strand. That is simply what it proclaimsitself--London air. If he had lived all his life in Green-head Ghyll,things would of course have been different. But it was his fate to cometo town--modern town--like Michael's son; and modern London (and Venice)are answerable for the state of their drains, not Byron.
Thirdly. His melancholy is without any relief whatsoever; his jestsadder than his earnest; while, in Elizabe
than work, all lament is fullof hope, and all pain of balsam.
Of this evil he has himself told you the cause in a single line,prophetic of all things since and now. 'Where _he_ gazed, a gloompervaded space.'[196]
So that, for instance, while Mr. Wordsworth, on a visit to town, beingan exemplary early riser, could walk, felicitous, on Westminster Bridge,remarking how the city now did like a garment wear the beauty of themorning; Byron, rising somewhat later, contemplated only the garmentwhich the beauty of the morning had by that time received for wear fromthe city: and again, while Mr. Wordsworth, in irrepressible religiousrapture, calls God to witness that the houses seem asleep, Byron, lamedemon as he was, flying smoke-drifted, unroofs the houses at a glance,and sees what the mighty cockney heart of them contains in the stilllying of it, and will stir up to purpose in the waking business of it,
'The sordor of civilisation, mixed With all the passions which Man's fall hath fixed.'[197]
Fourthly, with this steadiness of bitter melancholy, there is joined asense of the material beauty, both of inanimate nature, the loweranimals, and human beings, which in the iridescence, colour-depth, andmorbid (I use the word deliberately) mystery and softness of it,--withother qualities indescribable by any single words, and only to beanalysed by extreme care,--is found, to the full, only in five men thatI know of in modern times; namely Rousseau, Shelley, Byron, Turner, andmyself,--differing totally and throughout the entire group of us, fromthe delight in clear-struck beauty of Angelico and the Trecentisti; andseparated, much more singularly, from the cheerful joys of Chaucer,Shakespeare, and Scott, by its unaccountable affection for 'Rokkes blak'and other forms of terror and power, such as those of the ice-oceans,which to Shakespeare were only Alpine rheum; and the Via Malas andDiabolic Bridges which Dante would have condemned none but lost souls toclimb, or cross;--all this love of impending mountains, coiledthunder-clouds, and dangerous sea, being joined in us with a sulky,almost ferine, love of retreat in valleys of Charmettes, gulphs ofSpezzia, ravines of Olympus, low lodgings in Chelsea, and closebrushwood at Coniston.
And, lastly, also in the whole group of us, glows volcanic instinct ofAstraean justice returning not to, but up out of, the earth, which willnot at all suffer us to rest any more in Pope's serene 'whatever is, isright;' but holds, on the contrary, profound conviction that aboutninety-nine hundredths of whatever at present is, is wrong: convictionmaking four of us, according to our several manners, leaders ofrevolution for the poor, and declarers of political doctrine monstrousto the ears of mercenary mankind; and driving the fifth, less sanguine,into mere painted-melody of lament over the fallacy of Hope and theimplacableness of Fate.
In Byron the indignation, the sorrow, and the effort are joined to thedeath: and they are the parts of his nature (as of mine also in itsfeebler terms), which the selfishly comfortable public have, literally,no conception of whatever; and from which the piously sentimentalpublic, offering up daily the pure emotion of divine tranquillity,shrink with anathema not unembittered by alarm.
Concerning which matters I hope to speak further and with more preciseillustration in my next paper; but, seeing that this present one hasbeen hitherto somewhat sombre, and perhaps, to gentle readers, not alittle discomposing, I will conclude it with a piece of light biographicstudy, necessary to my plan, and as conveniently admissible in thisplace as afterwards;--namely, the account of the manner in whichScott--whom we shall always find, as aforesaid, to be in salient andpalpable elements of character, of the World, worldly, as Burns is ofthe Flesh, fleshly, and Byron of the Deuce, damnable,--spent his Sunday.
As usual, from Lockhart's farrago we cannot find out the first thing wewant to know,--whether Scott worked after his week-day custom, on theSunday morning. But, I gather, not; at all events his household and hiscattle rested (L. iii. 108). I imagine he walked out into his woods, orread quietly in his study. Immediately after breakfast, whoever was inthe house, 'Ladies and gentlemen, I shall read prayers at eleven, when Iexpect you all to attend' (vii. 306). Question of college and otherexternally unanimous prayers settled for us very briefly: 'if you haveno faith, have at least manners.' He read the Church of England service,lessons and all, the latter, if interesting, eloquently (_ibid._). Afterthe service, one of Jeremy Taylor's sermons (vi. 188). After the sermon,if the weather was fine, walk with his family, dogs included and guests,to _cold_ picnic (iii. 109), followed by short extempore biblicalnovelettes; for he had his Bible, the Old Testament especially, byheart, it having been his mother's last gift to him (vi. 174). Theselessons to his children in Bible history were always given, whetherthere was picnic or not. For the rest of the afternoon he took hispleasure in the woods with Tom Purdie, who also always appeared at hismaster's elbow on Sunday after dinner was over, and drank long life tothe laird and his lady and all the good company, in a quaigh of whiskeyor a tumbler of wine, according to his fancy (vi. 195). Whatever mighthappen on the other evenings of the week, Scott always dined at home onSunday; and with old friends: never, unless inevitably, receiving anyperson with whom he stood on ceremony (v. 335). He came into the roomrubbing his hands like a boy arriving at home for the holidays, hisPeppers and Mustards gambolling about him, 'and even the stately Maidagrinning and wagging his tail with sympathy.' For the usquebaugh of theless honoured week-days, at the Sunday board he circulated the champagnebriskly during dinner, and considered a pint of claret each man's fairshare afterwards (v. 339). In the evening, music being to the Scottishworldly mind indecorous, he read aloud some favourite author, for theamusement or edification of his little circle. Shakespeare it might be,or Dryden,--Johnson, or Joanna Baillie,--Crabbe, or Wordsworth. But inthose days 'Byron was pouring out his spirit fresh and full, and if anew piece from _his_ hand had appeared, it was _sure to be read by Scottthe Sunday evening afterwards_; and that with such delighted emphasis asshowed how completely the elder bard had kept up his enthusiasm forpoetry at pitch of youth, and all his admiration of genius, free, pure,and unstained by the least drop of literary jealousy' (v. 341).
With such necessary and easily imaginable varieties as chanced in havingDandy Dinmont or Captain Brown for guests at Abbotsford, or ColonelMannering, Counsellor Pleydell, and Dr. Robertson in Castle Street, suchwas Scott's habitual Sabbath: a day, we perceive, of eating the fat,(_dinner_, presumably not cold, being a work of necessity andmercy--thou also, even thou, Saint Thomas of Trumbull, hast thine!) anddrinking the sweet, abundant in the manner of Mr. Southey's cataract ofLodore,--'Here it comes, sparkling.' A day bestrewn with coronations andsops in wine; deep in libations to good hope and fond memory; a day ofrest to beast, and mirth to man, (as also to sympathetic beasts that canbe merry,) and concluding itself in an Orphic hour of delight,signifying peace on Tweedside, and goodwill to men, there or faraway;--always excepting the French, and Boney.
'Yes, and see what it all came to in the end.'
Not so, dark-virulent Minos-Mucklewrath; the end came of quite otherthings: of _these_, came such length of days and peace as Scott had inhis Fatherland, and such immortality as he has in all lands.
Nathless, firm, though deeply courteous, rebuke, for his sometimesovermuch light-mindedness, was administered to him by the more grave andthoughtful Byron. For the Lord Abbot of Newstead knew his Bible by heartas well as Scott, though it had never been given him by his mother asher dearest possession. Knew it, and, what was more, had thought of it,and sought in it what Scott had never cared to think, nor been fain toseek.
And loving Scott well, and always doing him every possible pleasure inthe way he sees to be most agreeable to him--as, for instance,remembering with precision, and writing down the very next morning,every blessed word that the Prince Regent had been pleased to say of himbefore courtly audience,--he yet conceived that such cheap ryming as hisown _Bride of Abydos_, for instance, which he had written from beginningto end in four days, or even the travelling reflections of Harold andJuan on men and women, were scarcely steady enough Sunday afternoon'sreading for a patriarch-Merlin like
Scott. So he dedicates to him a workof a truly religious tendency, on which for his own part he has done hisbest,--the drama of _Cain_. Of which dedication the virtual significanceto Sir Walter might be translated thus. Dearest and last of Bordersoothsayers, thou hast indeed told us of Black Dwarfs, and of WhiteMaidens, also of Grey Friars, and Green Fairies; also of sacred holliesby the well, and haunted crooks in the glen. But of the bushes that theblack dogs rend in the woods of Phlegethon; and of the crooks in theglen, and the bickerings of the burnie where ghosts meet the mightiestof us; and of the black misanthrope, who is by no means yet a dwarfedone, and concerning whom wiser creatures than Hobbie Elliot maytremblingly ask 'Gude guide us, what's yon?' hast thou yet known, seeingthat thou hast yet told, _nothing_.
Scott may perhaps have his answer. We shall in good time hear.
JOHN RUSKIN
FOOTNOTES:
[154] Nell, in the _Old Curiosity Shop_, was simply killed for themarket, as a butcher kills a lamb (see Forster's _Life_), and Paul waswritten under the same conditions of illness which affected Scott--apart of the ominous palsies, grasping alike author and subject, both in_Dombey_ and _Little Dorrit_.
[155] Chourineur' not striking with dagger-point, but ripping withknife-edge. Yet I do him, and La Louve, injustice in classing them withthe two others; they are put together only as parts in the samephantasm. Compare with La Louve, the strength of wild virtue in the'Louvecienne' (Lucienne) of Gaboriau--she, province-born and bred; andopposed to Parisian civilisation in the character of her sempstressfriend. 'De ce Paris, ou elle etait nee, elle savait tout--elleconnaissait tout. Rien ne l'etonnait, nul ne l'intimidait. Sa sciencedes details materiels de l'existence etait inconcevable. Impossible dela duper!--Eh bien! cette fille si laborieuse et si econome n'avait memepas la plus vague notion des sentiments qui sont l'honneur de la femme.Je n'avais pas idee d'une si complete absence de sens moral; d'une siinconsciente depravation, d'une impudence si effrontementnaive.'--_L'Argent des autres_, vol. i. p. 358.
[156] The reader who cares to seek it may easily find medical evidenceof the physical effects of certain states of brain disease in producingespecially images of truncated and Hermes-like deformity, complicatedwith grossness. Horace, in the _Epodes_, scoffs at it, but not withouthorror. Luca Signorelli and Raphael in their arabesques are deeplystruck by it: Durer, defying and playing with it alternately, is almostbeaten down again and again in the distorted faces, hewing halberts, andsuspended satyrs of his arabesques round the polyglot Lord's Prayer; ittakes entire possession of Balzac in the _Contes Drolatiques_; it struckScott in the earliest days of his childish 'visions' intensified by theaxe-stroke murder of his grand aunt; L. i. 142, and see close of thisnote. It chose for him the subject of the _Heart of Midlothian_, andproduced afterwards all the recurrent ideas of executions, tainting_Nigel_, almost spoiling _Quentin Durward_--utterly the _Fair Maid ofPerth_: and culminating in _Bizarro_, L. x. 149. It suggested all thedeaths by falling, or sinking, as in delirious sleep--Kennedy, EvelineNeville (nearly repeated in Clara Mowbray), Amy Robsart, the Master ofRavenswood in the quicksand, Morris, and Corporal Grace-be-here--comparethe dream of Gride, in _Nicholas Nickleby_, and Dickens's own lastwords, _on the ground_, (so also, in my own inflammation of the brain,two years ago, I dreamed that I fell through the earth and came out onthe other side). In its grotesque and distorting power, it produced allthe figures of the Lay Goblin, Pacolet, Flibbertigibbet, Cockledemoy,Geoffrey Hudson, Fenella, and Nectabanus; in Dickens it in like mannergives Quilp, Krook, Smike, Smallweed, Miss Mowcher, and the dwarfs andwax-work of Nell's caravan; and runs entirely wild in _Barnaby Rudge_,where, with a _corps de drame_ composed of one idiot, two madmen, agentleman fool who is also a villain, a shop-boy fool who is also ablackguard, a hangman, a shrivelled virago, and a doll inribands--carrying this company through riot and fire, till he hangs thehangman, one of the madmen, his mother, and the idiot, runs thegentleman-fool through in a bloody duel, and burns and crushes theshop-boy fool into shapelessness, he cannot yet be content withoutshooting the spare lover's leg off, and marrying him to the doll in awooden one; the shapeless shop-boy being finally also married in _two_wooden ones. It is this mutilation, observe, which is the very signmanual of the plague; joined, in the artistic forms of it, with a loveof thorniness--(in their mystic root, the truncation of the limblessserpent and the spines of the dragon's wing. Compare _Modern Painters_,vol. iv., 'Chapter on the Mountain Gloom,' s. 19); and in _all_ forms ofit, with petrifaction or loss of power by cold in the blood, whence thelast Darwinian process of the witches' charm--'cool it with a baboon's_blood_, _then_ the charm is firm and good.' The two frescoes in thecolossal handbills which have lately decorated the streets of London(the baboon with the mirror, and the Maskelyne and Cooke decapitation)are the final English forms of Raphael's arabesque under this influence;and it is well worth while to get the number for the week ending April3, 1880, of _Young Folks_--'A magazine of instructive and entertainingliterature for boys and girls of all ages,' containing 'A Sequel toDesdichado' (the modern development of Ivanhoe), in which a quitemonumental example of the kind of art in question will be found as aleading illustration of this characteristic sentence, "See, goodCerberus," said Sir Rupert, "_my hand has been struck off. You must makeme a hand of iron, one with springs in it, so that I can make it grasp adagger._" The text is also, as it professes to be, instructive; beingthe ultimate degeneration of what I have above called the 'folly' of_Ivanhoe_; for folly begets folly down, and down; and whatever Scott andTurner did wrong has thousands of imitators--their wisdom none will somuch as hear, how much less follow!
In both of the Masters, it is always to be remembered that the evil andgood are alike conditions of literal _vision_: and therefore also,inseparably connected with the state of the health. I believe the firstelements of all Scott's errors were in the milk of his consumptivenurse, which all but killed him as an infant, L. i. 19--and was withoutdoubt the cause of the teething fever that ended in his lameness (L. i.20). Then came (if the reader cares to know what I mean by Fors, let himread the page carefully) the fearful accidents to his only sister, andher death, L. i. 17; then the madness of his nurse, who planned his ownmurder (21), then the stories continually told him of the executions atCarlisle (24), his aunt's husband having seen them; issuing, he himselfscarcely knows how, in the unaccountable terror that came upon him atthe sight of statuary, 31--especially Jacob's ladder; then the murder ofMrs. Swinton, and finally the nearly fatal bursting of the blood vesselat Kelso, with the succeeding nervous illness, 65-67--solaced, while hewas being 'bled and blistered till he had scarcely a pulse left,' bythat history of the Knights of Malta--fondly dwelt on and realised byactual modelling of their fortress, which returned to his mind for thetheme of its last effort in passing away.
[157] 'Se dit par denigrement, d'un chretien qui ne croit pas les dogmesde sa religion.'--Fleming, vol. ii. p. 659.
[158] 'A son nom,' properly. The sentence is one of Victor Cherbuliez's,in _Prosper Randoce_, which is full of other valuable ones. See the oldnurse's 'ici bas les choses vont de travers, comme un chien qui va avepres, p. 93; and compare Prosper's treasures, 'la petite Venus, et lepetit Christ d'ivoire,' p. 121; also Madame Brehanne's request for thedivertissement of 'quelque belle batterie a coups de couteau' withDidier's answer. 'Helas! madame, vous jouez de malheur, ici dans laDrome, l'on se massacre aussi peu que possible,' p. 33.
[159] Edgeworth's _Tales_ (Hunter, 1827), 'Harrington and Ormond,' vol.iii. p. 260.
[160] Alice of Salisbury, Alice Lee, Alice Bridgnorth.
[161] Scott's father was habitually ascetic. 'I have heard his son tellthat it was common with him, if any one observed that the soup was good,to taste it again, and say, "Yes--it is too good, bairns," and dash atumbler of cold water into his plate.'--Lockhart's _Life_ (Black,Edinburgh, 1869), vol. i. p. 312. In other places I refer to this bookin the simple form of 'L.'
[162] A young lady sang to me, just before I copied out this page forpress, a Miss Somebo
dy's 'great song,' 'Live, and Love, and Die.' Had itbeen written for nothing better than silkworms, it should at least haveadded--Spin.
[163] See passage of introduction to _Ivanhoe_, wisely quoted in L. vi.106.
[164] See below, note, p. 25, on the conclusion of _Woodstock_.
[165] L. iv. 177.
[166] L. vi. 67.
[167] 'One other such novel, and there's an end; but who can last forever? who ever lasted so long?'--Sydney Smith (of the _Pirate_) toJeffrey, December 30, 1821. (_Letters_, vol. ii. p. 223.)
[168] L. vi. p. 188. Compare the description of Fairy Dean, vii. 192.
[169] All, alas! were now in a great measure so written. _Ivanhoe_, _TheMonastery_, _The Abbot_ and _Kenilworth_ were all published betweenDecember 1819 and January 1821, Constable & Co. giving five thousandguineas for the remaining copyright of them, Scott clearing ten thousandbefore the bargain was completed; and before the _Fortunes of Nigel_issued from the press Scott had exchanged instruments and received hisbookseller's bills for no less than four 'works of fiction,' not one ofthem otherwise described in the deeds of agreement, to be produced inunbroken succession, _each of them to fill up at least three volumes,but with proper saving clauses as to increase of copy money in case anyof them should run to four_; and within two years all this anticipationhad been wiped off by _Peveril of the Peak_, _Quentin Durward_, _St.Ronan's Well_, and _Redgauntlet_.
[170] _Woodstock_ was finished 26th March 1826. He knew then of hisruin; and wrote in bitterness, but not in weakness. The closing pagesare the most beautiful of the book. But a month afterwards Lady Scottdied; and he never wrote glad word more.
[171] Compare Mr. Spurgeon's not unfrequent orations on the samesubject.
[172] There are three definite and intentional portraits of himself, inthe novels, each giving a separate part of himself: Mr. Oldbuck, FrankOsbaldistone, and Alan Fairford.
[173] Andrew knows Latin, and might have coined the word in his conceit;but, writing to a kind friend in Glasgow, I find the brook was called'Molyndona' even before the building of the Sub-dean Mill in 1446. Seealso account of the locality in Mr. George's admirable volume, _OldGlasgow_, pp. 129, 149, &c. The Protestantism of Glasgow, since throwingthat powder of saints into her brook Kidron, has presented it with otherpious offerings; and my friend goes on to say that the brook, once famedfor the purity of its waters (much used for bleaching), 'has for nearlya hundred years been a crawling stream of loathsomeness. It is nowbricked over, and a carriage way made on the top of it; underneath thefoul mess still passes through the heart of the city, till it falls intothe Clyde close to the harbour.'
[174] The following fragments out of the letters in my own possession,written by Scott to the builder of Abbotsford, as the outer decorationsof the house were in process of completion, will show how accuratelyScott had pictured himself in Monkbarns.
'Abbotsford: April 21, 1817.
'Dear Sir,--Nothing can be more obliging than your attention to the oldstones. You have been as true as the sundial itself.' [The sundial hadjust been erected.] 'Of the two I would prefer the larger one, as it isto be in front of a parapet quite in the old taste. But in case ofaccidents it will be safest in your custody till I come to town again onthe 12th of May. Your former favours (which were weighty as acceptable)have come safely out here, and will be disposed of with great effect.'
'Abbotsford: July 30.
'I fancy the Tolbooth still keeps its feet, but, as it must soondescend, I hope you will remember me. I have an important use for theniche above the door; and though many a man has got a niche _in_ theTolbooth by building, I believe I am the first that ever got a niche outof it on such an occasion. For which I have to thank your kindness, andto remain very much your obliged humble servant,
'WALTER SCOTT.'
'August 16.
'My dear Sir,--I trouble you with this [_sic_] few lines to thank youfor the very accurate drawings and measurements of the Tolbooth door,and for your kind promise to attend to my interest and that ofAbbotsford in the matter of the Thistle and Fleur de Lis. Most of ourscutcheons are now mounted, and look very well, as the house issomething after the model of an old hall (not a castle), where suchthings are well in character.' [Alas--Sir Walter, Sir Walter!] 'I intendthe old lion to predominate over a well which the children havechristened the Fountain of the Lions. His present den, however,continues to be the hall at Castle Street.'
'September 5.
'Dear Sir,--I am greatly obliged to you for securing the stone. I am notsure that I will put up the gate quite in the old form, but I would liketo secure the means of doing so. The ornamental stones are now put up,and have a very happy effect. If you will have the kindness to let meknow when the Tolbooth door comes down, I will send in my carts for thestones; I have an admirable situation for it. I suppose the door itself'[he means, the wooden one] 'will be kept for the new jail; if not, andnot otherwise wanted, I would esteem it curious to possess it. CertainlyI hope so many sore hearts will not pass through the celebrated doorwhen in my possession as heretofore.'
* * * * *
'September 8.
'I should esteem it very fortunate if I could have the door also, thoughI suppose it is modern, having been burned down at the time ofPorteous-mob.
'I am very much obliged to the gentlemen who thought these remains ofthe Heart of Midlothian are not ill bestowed on their intendedpossessor.'
[175] Henceforward, not in affectation, but for the reader's betterconvenience, I shall continue to spell 'Ryme' without our wrongly added_h_.
[176] L. ii. 278.
[177] 'Che nella mente mia _ragiona_.' Love--you observe, the highest_Reasonableness_, instead of French _ivresse_, or even Shakespearian'mere folly'; and Beatrice as the Goddess of Wisdom in this third songof the _Convito_, to be compared with the Revolutionary Goddess ofReason; remembering of the whole poem chiefly the line:--
'Costei penso chi che mosso l'universo.'
(See Lyell's _Canzoniere_, p. 104.)
[178] [Greek: horan tes terpsios]--Plato, _Laws_, ii., Steph. 669.'Hour' having here nearly the power of 'Fate' with added sense of beinga daughter of Themis.
[179] 'Gunpowder is one of the greatest inventions of modern times, _andwhat has given such a superiority to civilised nations over barbarous_'!(_Evenings at Home_--fifth evening.) No man can owe more than I both toMrs. Barbauld and Miss Edgeworth; and I only wish that in the substanceof what they wisely said, they had been more listened to. Nevertheless,the germs of all modern conceit and error respecting manufacture andindustry, as rivals to Art and to Genius, are concentrated in '_Eveningsat Home_' and '_Harry and Lucy_'--being all the while themselves worksof real genius, and prophetic of things that have yet to be learned andfulfilled. See for instance the paper, 'Things by their Right Names,'following the one from which I have just quoted (The Ship), and closingthe first volume of the old edition of the _Evenings_.
[180] Carlyle, _French Revolution_ (Chapman, 1869), vol. ii. p. 70;conf. p. 25, and the _Ca ira_ at Arras, vol. iii. p. 276.
[181] _Ibid._ iii. 26.
[182] Carlyle, _French Revolution_, iii. 106, the last sentence alteredin a word or two.
[183] I have been greatly disappointed, in taking soundings of our mostmajestic mountain pools, to find them, in no case, verge on theunfathomable.
[184] 'It must be put by the original, stanza for stanza, and verse forverse; and you will see what was permitted in a Catholic country and abigoted age to Churchmen, on the score of Religion--and so tell thosebuffoons who accuse me of attacking the Liturgy.
'I write in the greatest haste, it being the hour of the Corso, and Imust go and buffoon with the rest. My daughter Allegra is just gone withthe Countess G. in Count G.'s coach and six. Our old Cardinal is dead,and the new one not appointed yet--but the masquing goes on the same.'(Letter to Murray, 355th in Moore, dated Ravenna, Feb. 7, 1828.) 'Adreadfully moral place, for you must no
t look at anybody's wife, exceptyour neighbour's.'
[185] See quoted _infra_ the mock, by Byron, of himself and all othermodern poets, _Juan_, canto iii. stanza 86, and compare canto xiv.stanza 8. In reference of future quotations the first numeral will standalways for canto; the second for stanza; the third, if necessary, forline.
[186] _Island_, ii. 16, where see context.
[187] _Juan_, viii. 5; but, by your Lordship's quotation, Wordsworthsays 'instrument'--not 'daughter.' Your Lordship had better have said'Infant' and taken the Woolwich authorities to witness: only Infantwould not have rymed.
[188] _Juan_, viii. 3; compare 14 and 63, with all its lovely context61--68: then 82, and afterwards slowly and with thorough attention, theDevil's speech, beginning, 'Yes, Sir, you forget' in scene 2 of _TheDeformed Transformed_: then Sardanapalus's, act i. scene 2, beginning'he is gone, and on his finger bears my signet,' and finally, the_Vision of Judgment_, stanzas 3 to 5.
[189] _Island_, iii. 3, and compare, of shore surf, the 'slings its highflakes, shivered into sleet' of stanza 7.
[190] A modern editor--of whom I will not use the expressions whichoccur to me--finding the 'we' a redundant syllable in the iambic line,prints 'we're.' It is a little thing--but I do not recollect, in theforty years of my literary experience, any piece of editor's retouchquite so base. But I don't read the new editions much; that must beallowed for.
[191] _Island_, ii. 5. I was going to say, 'Look to the context.' but amfain to give it here; for the stanza, learned by heart, ought to be ourschool-introduction to the literature of the world.
'Such was this ditty of Tradition's days, Which to the dead a lingering fame conveys In song, where fame as yet hath left no sign Beyond the sound whose charm is half divine; Which leaves no record to the sceptic eye, But yields young history all to harmony; A boy Achilles, with the centaur's lyre In hand, to teach him to surpass his sire. For one long-cherish'd ballad's simple stave Rung from the rock, or mingled with the wave, Or from the bubbling streamlet's grassy side, Or gathering mountain echoes as they glide, Hath greater power o'er each true heart and ear, Than all the columns Conquest's minions rear; Invites, when hieroglyphics are a theme For sages' labours or the student's dream; Attracts, when History's volumes are a toil-- The first, the freshest bud of Feeling's soil. Such was this rude rhyme--rhyme is of the rude, But such inspired the Norseman's solitude, Who came and conquer'd; such, wherever rise Lands which no foes destroy or civilise, Exist; and what can our accomplish'd art Of verse do more than reach the a waken'd heart?'
[192] _Shepherd's Calendar._ 'Coronation,' loyal-pastoral for Carnation;'sops in wine,' jolly-pastoral for double pink; 'paunce,' thoughtlesspastoral for pansy; 'chevisaunce' I don't know, (not in Gerarde);'flowre-delice'--pronounce dellice--half made up of 'delicate' and'delicious.'
[193] Herrick, _Dirge for Jephthah's Daughter_.
[194] _Passionate Pilgrim._
[195] In this point, compare the _Curse of Minerva_ with the _Tears ofthe Muses_.
[196] 'He,'--Lucifer; (_Vision of Judgment_, 24). It is preciselybecause Byron was _not_ his servant, that he could see the gloom. To theDevil's true servants, their Master's presence brings both cheerfulnessand prosperity;--with a delightful sense of their own wisdom and virtue;and of the 'progress' of things in general:--in smooth sea and fairweather,--and with no need either of helm touch, or oar toil: as whenonce one is well within the edge of Maelstrom.
[197] _Island_, ii. 4; perfectly orthodox theology, you observe; nodenial of the fall,--nor substitution of Bacterian birth for it. Nay,nearly Evangelical theology, in contempt for the human heart; but withdeeper than Evangelical humility, acknowledging also what is sordid inits civilisation.
THE
ELEMENTS OF DRAWING
IN
THREE LETTERS TO BEGINNERS
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS DRAWN BY THE AUTHOR