ART. VI.-The Border Edition of the Waverley Novels. With Introductory Essays and Notes by Andrew Lang, supplementing those of the Author. Illustrated by more than Two Hundred and Fifty new and original Etchings by eminent Artists. London, 1892-94. It is now just sixty-three since the author was is now just eighty-one years since the publication of laid among the dust of his ancestors in the Abbey of Dryburgh. During Scott's lifetime his novels on the whole suffered no loss of popularity, though the last were less admired than the first. After a time they very naturally ceased to be so much talked of, and, as new writers appeared upon the scene, ceased perhaps to be so much read. But that has only been the fate of all our great classics, Shakespeare and Dryden, Pope and Addison, Fielding and Smollett, Dickens and Thackeray. Nobody thinks the fact any proof that they were overrated in their own day, or that they do not still deserve all that their contemporaries thought of them. So with the Waverleys. There they still stand, as distinct a land-mark in our literary history as the Shakespearian dramas: like these, without an equal; and, like these, never to be repeated. The measure of their power and their beauty may be found in the severity of the criticism, which they have not only survived, but survived without the slightest depreciation. Inconsistencies, repetitions, gross improbabilities, tedious introductions, hurried and perplexed conclusions, faults of construction, neglect of facts, historical mistakes, false archæology, have all been proved against the author of Waverley,' and have left him exactly where he was. The only two books in the English language which have resisted similar attacks are the Bible and Shakespeare. Against all three the keenest intellects and most learned commentators have dashed themselves in vain. 6 There is a power in all three of them from which these attacks rebound harmlessly, like the arrows from De Bracy's helmet on the ramparts of Torquilstone. Scott was not called the Wizard of the North for nothing; and the publication of a new edition of the novels in some fifty handsome volumes, enriched with introductory essays by Mr. Andrew Lang, shows conclusively that their reputation is not upon the wane. The completion of the Border Edition affords a convenient opportunity for indulging in some further speculations on the character of the spell which has thus defied the whole armoury of wit. After the lapse of many years, when we stand stand far enough off from the Waverleys to see them in perspective and in their relation to other works of kindred genius, we hope to escape the charge of repeating only a thrice-told tale. Mr. Lang strikes the right note in his frequent comparisons between Scott and Shakespeare, and in his brief reference to the significance of the fact dwelt on at greater length by Professor Masson, that Scott was the first novelist who was a poet. But neither seems to see quite all that it implies, or its bearing on the great work which Scott was appointed to perform. Mr. Lang has had access to the MSS. and other material now preserved at Abbotsford; but they have not yielded much in the way of novelty. They have enabled him to correct a mistake made by Lockhart in reference to St. Ronan's Well.' With this exception we have not observed any important additions which he has made to our knowledge of the history and progress of the Waverleys. Still the essays are very interesting, and we only wish the illustrations were half as good. Before proceeding to the main object of this paper, it will be necessary to take into account the circumstances which were in Scott's favour when the publication of the Waverleys began. At the commencement of the present century the novel had by no means attained that high rank in our literature which it holds at the present day. The historical novel was hardly known at all, or known only through writers of a very inferior order, who seldom satisfied the demands of good sense and good taste. Throughout the eighteenth century our forefathers looked to Covent Garden or Drury Lane for the wares which we now procure from the nearest circulating library. Besides the Restoration dramatists, the plays of the two Colmans, Cibber, Murphy, Macklin, and Cumberland, to say nothing of Goldsmith and Sheridan, constituted their world of fiction; and long after the novel had begun to compete successfully with the drama for popular favour, the latter continued to be esteemed the superior department of the two. The causes which led to the decline of the old eighteenthcentury comedy and the establishment of the novel on its ruins have been variously explained. One reason may be found in the commonplace fact that, as the number of readers increased in proportion to the number of playgoers, it became better worth while to write for them; and that, as the sphere of criticism enlarged, the town' lost its exclusive pretensions to occupy the chair, and the theatre that literary and fashionable halo which had encircled it, with a brief interval, from Elizabeth to Anne. Sir Walter Scott himself, in his Essay on the Drama, has given his own view of the decadence of the English stage toward the close close of the last century. He thinks that the comedy of the period was French in origin and construction, and that with the decay of French models it naturally languished and disappeared. We suppose he would have said the same, though he did not say it, of the comedy of intrigue,' or what he calls the Spanish comedy. The one left no more successors than the other. But may it not be said that for the success of social comedy, or the comedy of manners, on the stage, more lights and shades are required than are furnished by modern society; stronger contrasts, a more formal and ceremonious carriage, more distinctive and more striking costumes? At all events, this much will hardly be disputed, that it must have been easier to act the part of a gentleman on the stage when there were so many distinctive marks of the gentleman off the stage; when to wear a rich dress, to carry a sword, to be able to make an elegant bow, and to be skilled in the management of a cane and a snuff-box, went so far to constitute a gentleman. All this could easily be taught; and 'the true grace of it,' which honest Mike Lambourne laments that he never could acquire, would not be much missed in a large and not over-lighted theatre. As manners, dress, and general demeanour became simpler and plainer, and the representation of a gentleman or a lady came to depend less on externals and more on qualifications not so easily picked up, the task of the genteel comedian became more and more difficult, and his efforts to accomplish it less and less successful.* Moreover, with the closing of the Continent against Englishmen, a great change took place in the habits of the English aristocracy, who, as soon as the London season was over, used to flock to Paris. They had now to seek their amusements in their own country, and the line of demarcation between the rural squire and the man of fashion lost much of its sharpness. Lord Foppington and Sir Brilliant Fashion adopted the pursuits of country gentlemen, and the lower classes of the territorial order caught in turn the tone of the higher. In 'The Poor Gentleman,' written in 1802, Sir Charles Cropland tells the steward of his Kentish estates that he must hunt in Leicestershire-'tis the thing.' This is the first mention of the metropolis of fox-hunting that we know of, in polite literature. Here was one fertile source of business' cut off at once from both actor and playwright. The country gentleman in London robbed of his money or betrayed by his wife, the victim and the butt of wits and gamblers, was for many years a stock character on the * We need hardly say that these remarks have no reference to the present stage, where ladies and gentlemen appear in characters of all kinds. Vol. 180.-No. 360. 2 F London London boards, and his disappearance left a vacuum in the dramatic repertory which nothing could fill up. The simplicity of modern manners and the undemonstrative character of modern passion, even at its deepest, make it almost impossible to place upon the stage a play which shall exactly reproduce the life of modern clubs and drawing-rooms. Many other causes were at work at the same time to undermine the popularity of the theatre: the Evangelical movement, for instance, is said to have exercised a very injurious effect on its fortune. Thus, by the end of the century the drama was tottering on its throne, and fast giving place to its rival. Fielding and Richardson mark the epoch when the rivalry may be said to have commenced: with the appearance of Evelina,' 'Castle Rackrent,' 'Marriage,' and 'Pride and Prejudice,' the scale began to turn decisively in favour of the novelist. authoresses of these works, however, transferred only comedy from the stage to the library. The master who was to complete the process and do the same for tragedy and the historic drama was yet to appear. The vacant niche was waiting for him. Scott stepped into it, and became the Shakespeare of the nineteenth century. He did with the novel what Shakespeare had done with the drama, and ever since his reign the novel has held incontestably the first place. The It is curious to find two such men as Ruskin and Newman giving such widely opposite accounts of Scott's original popularity. Mr. Ruskin has a theory that Scott was the representative poet of his age in virtue of his sadness and his scepticism-a strange description of Scott, surely, as well as of his age. Neither sadness nor scepticism was the prevailing note of the English people during the first quarter of the present century, whatever they may be of the last. And even if they were visible in Scott, we should have to look elsewhere for the secret of his influence during the fifteen years that followed the great war. But are they visible in Scott? All poets alike dwell at times on the brevity of human life, on the vanity of human wishes, on the sorrows and disappointments to which mankind are born. Such reflections do not necessarily represent the habitual mood of the poet. In Scott's novels, at all events, we should have said that cheerfulness was a conspicuous feature; while as for lack of faith, it is difficult to understand how any one could bring such a charge against Sir Walter Scott. Mr. Ruskin seems to rely on the fact that Scott could not bring himself to believe in the Bodach Glas, or the White Lady, and that in Woodstock' he does his best to make such credulity ridiculous. But by the word 'scepticism' something something more is usually meant than a disbelief in ghosts and spectres. Mr. Ruskin here seems to be falling into the same kind of mistake which he has made about Scott's antiquarianism. He also refers to some fancied evidence of it in Scott's behaviour on the death of his wife. But seeing that Scott in his private journal, intended only for his own eye, speaks of the mysterious yet certain hope of seeing her again in a better world, we cannot allow that Mr. Ruskin gains much by this appeal. Certain it is, however, that it could have been neither melancholy nor infidelity which won the heart of a nation drunk with victory and bathed in glory, and boasting itself favoured above all nations by the hand of God. To the great mass of the English people eighty years ago, 'That Christ had risen from the dead was as sure as that the sun had risen that morning. That they would themselves rise was as certain as that they would die, and as positively would one day be called to judgment for the good or ill that they had done in life.' It was with a faith of this kind that Scott had to reckon, and it is nonsense to suppose that he could have leaped into popularity as he did, had his works exhibited the faintest traces of scepticism. Newman's explanation of Scott's popularity is the reverse of Ruskin's. He attributes it to the general need that was felt of something deeper and more attractive than the religion and literature of the eighteenth century; not to faithlessness, but to the craving for a fuller and deeper faith, which sympathised at once with Scott's picture of the Middle Ages, setting before his readers visions which, when once seen, are not easily forgotten, and silently indoctrinating them with nobler ideas, which might afterwards be appealed to as first principles.' This account of the matter is nearer the mark than Ruskin's; but it is not an exhaustive one, and leaves much to be added before the argument is complete. It is here to be noted, that as the two great events in modern history are the Reformation and the French Revolution, so we see Shakespeare directly following the one and Scott the other. The sanguine, buoyant, adventurous, and enthusiastic spirit which marks the Elizabethan age, and was the natural result of the rupture of old bonds and the dawn upon the human mind of a new era, had its counterpart, to some extent, in the highlywrought tone of public feeling which became apparent, both at home and abroad, about the middle of the reign of George III., · * Froude, Short Studies on Great Subjects,' ii. 261. when |