his method. He has often, he says in answer to an imaginary critic,
begun by laying down a plan of his work and tried to construct an ideal
story, evolving itself by due degrees and ending by a proper
catastrophe. But, a demon seats himself on his pen, and leads it astray.
Characters expand; incidents multiply; the story lingers while the
materials increase; Bailie Jarvie or Dugald Dalgetty leads him astray,
and he goes many a weary mile from the regular road and has to leap
hedge and ditch to get back. If he resists the temptation, his
imagination flags and he becomes prosy and dull. No one can read his
best novels without seeing the truth of this description. 'Waverley'
made an immense success as a description of new scenes and social
conditions: the story of Waverley himself is the least interesting part
of the book. Everybody who has read 'Guy Mannering' remembers Dandie
Dinmont and Meg Merrilies and Pleydell and Dominie Sampson; but how many
people could explain the ostensible story--the love affair of Vanbeest
Brown and Julia Mannering? We can see how Scott put the story together.
He was pouring out the most vivid and interesting recollections of the
borderers whom he knew so well, of the old Scottish gentry and smugglers
and peasants, and the old-fashioned lawyers who played high jinks in the
wynds of Edinburgh. No more delightful collection of portraits could be
brought together. But he had to get a story as a thread. He started with
the legend about an astrological prediction told of Dryden and one of
his sons, and mixed it up with the Annesley case, where a claimant
turned up with more plausibility than the notorious Orton. This
introduced of necessity an impossible and conventional bit of lovemaking
and a recognition of a long-lost heir. He is full of long-lost heirs.
Equally conventional and impossible stories are introduced in the
'Antiquary,' the 'Heart of Midlothian,' and the 'Legend of Montrose' and
elsewhere. Nobody cares about them, and the characters which ostensibly
play the chief part serve merely to introduce us to the subordinate
actors. 'Waverley,' for example, gives a description drawn with
unsurpassable spirit of the state of the Highland clans in 1745; and
poor Waverley's love affair passes altogether out of sight during the
greatest and most interesting part of the narrative. When Moore said of
the poems that Scott intended to illustrate all the gentlemen's seats
between Edinburgh and London, h