ly
remarkable for a punctilious pride which gives their creator some
difficulty in keeping them out of superfluous duels. When they fall in
love, they always seem to feel themselves as Lovel felt himself in the
'Antiquary,' under the eye of Jonathan Oldbuck, who was himself once in
love but has come to see that he was a fool for his pains. Certainly,
somehow or other, they are apt to be terribly wooden. Cranstoun in the
'Lay of the Last Minstrel,' Graeme in the 'Lady of the Lake,' or Wilton
in 'Marmion,' are all unspeakable bores. Waverley himself, and Lovel in
the 'Antiquary,' and Vanbeest Brown in 'Guy Mannering,' and Harry Morton
in 'Old Mortality,' and, in short, the whole series of Scott's pattern
young men, are all chips of the same block. They can all run, and ride,
and fight, and make pretty speeches, and express the most becoming
sentiments; but somehow they all partake of one fault, the same which
was charged against the otherwise incomparable horse, namely, that they
are dead. And we must confess that this is a considerable drawback from
Scott's novels. To take the passion out of a novel is something like
taking the sunlight out of a landscape; and to condemn all the heroes to
be utterly commonplace is to remove the centre of interest in a manner
detrimental to the best intents of the story. When Thackeray endeavoured
to restore Rebecca to her rightful place in 'Ivanhoe,' he was only doing
what is more or less desirable in all the series. We long to dismount
these insipid creatures from the pride of place, and to supplant them by
some of the admirable characters who are doomed to play subsidiary
parts. There is, however, another reason for this weakness which seems
to be overlooked by many of Scott's critics. We are often referred to
Scott as a master of pure and what is called 'objective' story-telling.
Certainly I don't deny that Scott could be an admirable story-teller:
'Ivanhoe' and the 'Bride of Lammermoor' would be sufficient to convict
me of error if I did. But as mere stories, many of his novels--and
moreover his masterpieces--are not only faulty, but distinctly bad.
Taking him purely and simply from that point of view, he is very
inferior, for example, to Alexandre Dumas. You cannot follow the thread
of most of his narratives with any particular interest in the fate of
the chief actors. In the 'Introductory Epistle' prefixed to the
'Fortunes of Nigel' Scott himself gives a very interesting account of