A very different reason for the decline of Scott's popularity is given by Mr Archibald Stalker in the strangest of the books that now lie before us. It is indeed a strange book, and we would not seek to drag it from its three years of oblivion were it not marked in many places by shrewd good sense, and by a very real appreciation of some of Scott's great gifts. It is, however, a farrago rather than a book. One would like to put into parallel columns, first Mr Stalker's own selfcontradictions on his subject, and secondly the worst of his indictments side by side with the criticisms of Lockhart (whom he acknowledges as all but the greatest of biographers, and who, after all, knew his father-in-law better than Mr Stalker knows him). And what are we to think of the judgment of a critic who says that Boswell's Johnson has always seemed to him rather verbiage for the bookworm than the substance of life'; that 'the Elizabethan dramatists' (he does not mean to include Shakespeare, though he does not verbally exclude him) 'were as dull a set of ranters as ever existed, the Restoration writers, with all the resources of obscenity and viciousness, could not be humorous, the Miltons,* Popes, Swifts, Fieldings, Grays, and the rest, were dull and heavy.'t We merely ask whether this is a good initial equipment for a gentleman who writes, often with insight and sympathy, about Scott?

The truth seems to be that Mr Stalker is torn in two opposite directions, in the one by his admiration of Scott's iron will, sociable qualities, and sweetness of temper, in the other by hatred of his political and social opinions. Into this last, we think, it is that he contrives to read an estimate of Scott's literary gifts so low as to amount to contempt. Yet every now and then he wrenches himself violently back from this contemptuous attitude. Nil fuit unquam sic impar sibi as Mr Stalker. Take the following passages and compare them:

'Readers of books are yet alive who remember the time when it was still considered ridiculous to take Sir Walter's

* 'Milton's works are heavy, not a joke all through,' wrote a guileless schoolboy whom the present writer once examined.

+ P. 163; from an earlier passage on p. 2 we gather that he has some tenderness for Goldsmith.

own estimate of his literary value. Year by year the world has been coming round to his way of thinking, and those who go to gaze now on the bright landscape that he created on Tweed can join with him in his profound estimate of the tasks he did-"My oaks will outlast my laurels." . . . His long poems are uninspired and people, after a hundred years, have admitted the truth of his opinion that what he called his "big bow-wow" method of writing prose was apt to become intolerable.'*

I do not think that Sir Walter, with all his modesty, ever said anything like 'intolerable.' Mr Stalker is probably thinking of the passage in the 'Journal' (March 14, 1826), in which Scott praises 'Pride and Prejudice' so highly-' That young lady has a talent for describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life, which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with. The big Bow-wow strain I can do myself like any now going; but the exquisite touch. . . is denied to me.' The words big Bow-wow strain' may occur elsewhere in Scott's letters, etc., but I cannot lay my hands on them.

'There was nothing romantic about Scott except his iron will, his passion for planting, and his healthy story-telling life.' t

'His life and personality were much more interesting than the writings that fascinated Europe in his day.' +

'It is not as an intellectual nor an artistic force that Sir Walter appeals to this generation. . . . There is in his verse no more than in Byron's, or Southey's; it is not the real thing. As a novelist he is outshone by two men now living, or by more.' §

"Those broken-winded metres.' ||

'It is just because there was in Scott no spiritual impulse that the main themes of his novels and poems are never successful as artistic efforts.'

And then, forgetting their long and affectionate friendship, forgetting Wordsworth's adoration of the novels, and also his habitual depreciation of all his poetical contemporaries, Mr Stalker picks up one of Wordsworth's far from rare snarls, As a poet Scott cannot live, for he has never in verse written anything † P. 36. + P. 63. § P. 77. || P. 166.

addressed to the immortal part of man.' (Alas! we know that W. W. thought that no poet but himself had done so; and, in our estimation, he was so much the greatest of English poets that perhaps he was right.)

Now the man who writes all this depreciatory stuff suddenly astonishes us by telling us that:

"The characteristic and vital quality of an artist, the fire within him that illumines his own generation, are too easily forgotten when fifty or a hundred years have brought his work into the cold gallery of the immortals. But we who admire Scott will never let the appraisers of fame forget that all literature was dull before him, and he made it interesting ' (follows the tirade quoted above from p. 2). And then for the first time since Shakespeare arose a man with joyful power in the description of his fellow creatures. . . . He evoked the characteristics of Scotland, physical and national; he created magnificent pictures of old time like "Ivanhoe," the imperishable romance. He changed the spirit of British History; he gave a revelation of Scottish character that has stood the test of a hundred years and is still fresh and true' (pp. 163-4).

...

This noble and true praise, and this comparison with Shakespeare, are diluted by the author's dictum that Scott, like Shakespeare, 'succeeded best with his minor characters.' And we, in all seriousness, ask him whether Lear is not the hero of 'King Lear,' Othello of Othello,' Macbeth and Lady Macbeth the hero and heroine of 'Macbeth,' as much as Falstaff and Hotspur are of 'Henry IV'? Who thinks of Touchstone or Rosalind as minor characters'? And is not the Baron the true hero of 'Waverley' as is the Antiquary of 'The Antiquary,' Dalgetty of 'The Legend,' Wandering Willie and Peter Peebles of 'Redgauntlet,' Di Vernon of 'Rob Roy'? It seems to us that Mr Stalker cannot have it both waysSir Walter cannot both be artist and no artist, cannot both have nothing romantic about him,' and be the creator of 'imperishable romance.'

·

What, then, is Romance? The New English Dictionary has several definitions of the word, e.g. A tale in verse, embodying the adventure of some hero of chivalry, also, later, a prose tale of a similar character': 'A fictitious narrative in prose, of which the scene and incidents are

very remote from those of ordinary life': An extravagant fiction, invention or story.' It is in this latter sense that Macaulay uses the word. Milton ('dull fellow') thought of

'What resounds

In Fable or Romance of Uther's Son:'

which gives us a better idea of the meaning of the word. But to all these we prefer that given by Mr Kipling in the invocatory ode (if ode be the right word) which is prefixed to his 'Many Inventions': it is something impalpable 'whose garments' hem we may touch only in dreams'; it is the 'regent of spheres that lock our fears and hopes'; 'who holds by it has Heaven in fee to gild his dross,' and 'to possess in loneliness the joy of all the earth.' To quote yet another modern Romantic,' Olive Schreiner, to him the ideal shall be real.' After all, to whom could we go better for an explanation than to Scott himself (not, however, when he was beguiled into thinking that Abbotsford was 'a sort of romance in Architecture') ?

'My own enthusiasm was chiefly awakened by the wonderful and the terrible-the common taste of children, but in which I have remained a child even unto this day.' , *

'I was born a Scotchman and a bare one, and was therefore born to fight my way with my left hand where my right failed me, and with my teeth if they were both cut off.' †

'I do not compare myself in point of imagination with Wordsworth-far from it; for his is naturally exquisite and highly cultivated from constant exercise. But I can see as many castles in the clouds as any man. My life has been spent in such day-dreams. But I cry no roast meat. There are times a man should remember what Rousseau used to say, "Tais-toi, Jean-Jacques, car on ne t'entend pas."‡

...

The fact that Scott cried his own wares so little, and so constantly spoke of them as unimportant in comparison with action and Life with a big L, does not justify Mr Stalker in snarling that he would rather have been Duke of Buccleuch or Duke of Blankshire than Shakespeare,' § in openly suggesting that he was

* Autobiography, Lockhart, chap. i, p. 8.

† To Morritt, 1810, Lockhart, chap. xx, p. 191.
§ P. 175.

'Journal,' Jan. 1, 1827.

an appalling snob and sycophant, in speaking of his 'nauseating servility to the Duke of Wellington' (whom he regarded as the Saviour of Europe after a nightmare of twenty-two years), or in hinting, throughout his sixteenth chapter, that even his political opinions were adopted in order to curry favour with Dukes and Tories. But to continue :

'The love of solitude was with me a passion of early youth : when in my teens I used to fly from company to indulge in visions and airy castles of my own.' #

'While Tom [Purdie] marks out a drain or a dyke as I have directed, one's fancy may be running its ain riggs in some other world.' †

And then let us hear his interpreter, Lockhart:

'His delight and pride was to play with the genius which nevertheless mastered him at will. For, in truth, what is it that gives to all his works their unique and marking charm except the matchless effect which sudden effusions of the purest heart's blood of nature derive from their being poured out to all appearance involuntarily ? . . . In the interludes and passionate parentheses of "The Lay" we have the poet's own inner soul laid bare and throbbing before us.' ‡

Of 'Waverley,' says Lockhart:

'Loftier Romance was never blended with easier quainter humour by Cervantes himself; he had combined the strength of Smollett' [too dull a fellow, one supposes, for Mr Stalker even to mention in his New Dunciad] 'with the native elegance and unaffected pathos of Goldsmith: in his darker scenes he had revived that real tragedy which appeared to have left our stage with the age of Shakespeare.' §

Strangely enough, Lockhart's praise of 'Redgauntlet,' greater than Waverley,' and, in our judgment, the greatest of all humour-seasoned romances, is comparatively cold. Most intimate of all perhaps is this:

'We should try to picture for ourselves what the actual intellectual life must have been of the author of such a series of romances. We should ask ourselves whether, filling and discharging so soberly and gracefully as he did the common

* 'Journal,' March 28, 1826. Ibid, chap. xiii, p. 120.

† Lockhart, chap. xlii, p. 378.
§ Ibid, chap. xxxiii, p. 302.

|| Ibid, chap. lx, p. 514.