صور الصفحة
PDF
النشر الإلكتروني

dorsation, to her former suitor, the honest farmer, who had obtained a favorable opportunity of renewing his addresses. Such is the simple plan of a story which we peruse with pleasure, if not with deep interest, and which perhaps we might more willingly resume than one of those narratives where the attention is strongly riveted, during the first perusal, by the powerful excitement of curiosity.

The author's knowledge of the world, and the peculiar tact with which she presents characters that the reader cannot fail to recognize, reminds us something of the merits of the Flemish school of painting. The subjects are not often elegant, and certainly never grand; but they are finished up to nature, and with a precision which delights the reader. This is a merit which it is very difficult to illustrate by extracts, because it pervades the whole work, and is not to be comprehended from a single passage.

*

*

*

*

The faults, on the contrary, arise from the minute detail which the author's plan comprehends. Characters of folly or simplicity, such as those of old Woodhouse and Miss Bates, are ridiculous when first presented, but if too often brought forward or too long dwelt upon, their prosing is apt to become as tiresome in fiction as in real society. Upon the whole, the turn of this author's novels bears the same relation to that of the sentimental and romantic cast, that cornfields and cottages and meadows bear to the highly adorned grounds of a show mansion, or the rugged sublimities of a mountain landscape. It is neither so captivating as the one, nor so grand as the other, but it affords to those who frequent it a pleasure nearly allied with the experience of their own social habits; and what is of some importance, the youthful wanderer may return from his promenade to the ordinary business of life, without any chance of having his head turned by the recollection of the scene through which he has been wandering.

ON THE TATLER1

WILLIAM HAZLITT

Of all the periodical Essayists (our ingenious predecessors), the Tatler has always appeared to us the most accomplished and agreeable. Montaigne, who was the father of this kind of personal authorship among the moderns, in which the reader is admitted behind the curtain, and sits down with the writer in his gown and slippers, was a most magnanimous and undisguised egotist; but Isaac Bickerstaff, Esq., was the more disinterested gossip of the two. The French author is contented to describe the peculiarities of his own mind and person, which he does with a most copious and unsparing hand. The English journalist, goodnaturedly, lets you into the secret both of his own affairs and those of his neighbors. A young lady, on the other side of Temple Bar, cannot be seen at her glass for half a day together, but Mr. Bickerstaff takes due notice of it; and he has the first intelligence of the symptoms of the belle passion appearing in any young gentleman at the west end of the town. The departures and arrivals of widows with handsome jointures, either to bury their grief in the country, or to procure a second husband in town, are regularly recorded in his pages. He is well acquainted with the celebrated beauties of the last age at the Court of Charles the Second, and the old gentleman often grows romantic in recounting the disastrous strokes which his youth suffered from the glance of their bright eyes and their unaccountable caprices. In particular, he dwells with a secret satisfaction on one of his mistresses who left him for a rival, and whose constant reproach to her husband, on occasion of any quarrel between them, was, "I, that might have married the famous Mr. Bickerstaff, to be treated in this manner!" The club at the Trumpet consists of a set of persons as entertaining as himself. The cavalcade of the justice of the peace, the knight of the shire, the country squire, and the young gentleman,

1 From the Round Table.

his nephew, who waited on him at his chambers in such form and ceremony, seem not to have settled the order of their precedence to this hour; and we should hope the upholsterer and his companions in the Green Park stand as fair a chance for immortality as some modern politicians. Mr. Bickerstaff himself is a gentleman and a scholar, a humorist and a man of the world, with a great deal of nice easy naïveté about him. If he walks out and is caught in a shower of rain, he makes us amends for this unlucky accident by a criticism on the shower in Virgil, and concludes with a burlesque copy of verses on a city shower. He entertains us, when he dares, from his own apartment, with a quotation from Plutarch or a moral reflection; from the Grecian coffeehouse with politics, and from Will's or the Temple with the poets and players, the beaux and men of wit and pleasure about town. In reading the pages of the Tatler we seem as if suddenly transported to the age of Queen Anne- of toupees and full-bottomed periwigs. The whole appearance of our dress and manners undergoes a delightful metamorphosis. We are surprised with the rustling of hoops and the glittering of paste buckles. The beaux and belles are of a quite different species; we distinguish the dappers, the smarts, and the pretty fellows, as they pass; we are introduced to Betterton and Mrs. Oldfield behind the scenes are made familiar with the persons of Mr. Penkethman and Mr. Bullock; we listen to a dispute at a tavern on the merits of the Duke of Marlborough or Marshal Turenne; or are present at the first rehearsal of a play by Vanbrugh, or the reading of a new poem by Mr. Pope. The privilege of thus virtually transporting ourselves to past times is even greater than that of visiting distant places. London a hundred years ago would be better worth seeing than Paris at the present moment.

THE WAVERLEY NOVELS 1

GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY

THE basis of reality in the Waverley Novels is one of their most distinguishing qualities, and underlies their endurance in literature. It is not merely that particular characters are studied from life; that George Constable and John Clerk sat for The Antiquary, that Scott himself is Mr. Mannering, that Laidlaw or another is Dandie Dinmont; nor is it that other characters, like Meg Merrillies and the gypsies are suggestions from living figures that had arrested the author's passing glance. It is not that the scene of Castle Dangerous is governed by what his eye beheld on his visit there, or the whole landscape of The Pirate transcribed from his voyages among the islands of the north. Still less is it what he gained from books, either of ordinary history and records of events or such sermons as those from which he transferred the dark and intense eloquence of Old Mortality. He had such a marvellous memory for whatever bore the national stamp, he was so brain-packed with the ocular and audible experience of his converse with the people, so full of their physiognomy, gesture, and phrase, that he fed his narrative incessantly with actuality; and such was his surplus of treasure of this sort that in his general edition he continued to pour out an illustrative stream of anecdote, reminiscence, and antiquarian lore in the notes and prefaces. A keen friend was confirmed in his belief of Scott's authorship by the presence of a striking phrase that he heard him once use. The Scotch novels

are, as it were, an amalgam of memory. When he came to write them, all his love of tradition and the country-side with which his mind was impregnated, was precipitated in an unfailing flow. It was because Scott was so much alive with Scotland, that he made his characters live with that intense reality, that instant conviction of their truth, in which he is to

1 From the essay on Scott in Great Writers. The Macmillan Company, 1907. Reprinted by permission.

be compared only with Shakespeare. It is true that it is a man of letters who wrote the Waverley Novels, a mind fed on the stuff of medieval romance and on the tradition of the English drama, the "old play" of which he was so fond; but the literary element in the tales is a thing of allusion, like Waverley's studies, or episodical, as in the character of Bunce or on a more important scale of Sir Percie Shafton, or else its rambling antiquarianism serves to set forth Scotch pedantry appropriately. The Waverley Novels are not a development out of older literature, they are an original growth, a fresh form of the imaginative interpretation of the human past, a new and vital rendering straight from life. Even in the tales whose scene is laid in England and the continent, where Scott was more dependent on printed sources, the literary element is little more perceptible than in the Scotch novels themselves; the sense of reality in them is not appreciably less. But Scott already had the best historical education as a living discipline in assimilating his own country, and he came to the interpretation of history in other lands with trained powers of understanding and imagination in that field. A distinguished historian once expressed to me his admiration for Count Robert of Paris, and I was glad to find such unexpected support for my own liking of this novel, which is generally regarded, I believe, as a pitiable example of Scott's mental decline; but my friend had been struck, he said, by its remarkable grasp of history, its brilliant adequacy in that way. It was the same power with which Scott had grasped Ivanhoe, and told the tale of Quentin Durward, and made Richard Lionheart like one of Shakespeare's kings. He had learned the way by making history alive on his own heath in the most living contact with the past that ever man had.

Veracity is the first great quality of the Waverley Novels. The second is emotional power. Scott was a man of strength; he liked strong deeds and strong men; and he liked strong emotions. I do not mean the passion of love, in which he showed little interest. The way of a man with a maid was not to him the whole of life. In the national temperament in its action in history he found two great emotions: the passion of loyalty,

« السابقةمتابعة »