The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21).
Volume XII. The Romantic Revival.
§ 16. His treatment of love
Generally, it may be said that Scott is least successful with his more morally correct and least eccentric personages. He specially fails to interest us in his lovers—perfectly proper but rather buckram young men, with merely average commonplace characteristics. Of Waverley, he himself said:
However admirably he could create a strong and thrilling situation, Scott, in the portrayal of love episodes, fails to interest his readers so much as do many less distinguished novelists. Here, he shows little literary kinship with Shakespeare, with whom he is sometimes compared, with whose influence he was in many respects strongly saturated, from whom he obtained important guidance in regard to artistic methods and whose example is specially apparent in some of his more striking situations. For his almost gingerly method of dealing with love affairs, the exceedingly conventional character of the Edinburgh society in which he moved may, in part, be held responsible. He had an inveterate respect for the stereotyped proprieties. By the time, also, that he began to write his prose romances, love, with him, had mellowed into the tranquil affection of married life. It was mainly in a fatherly kind of way that he interested himself in the amatory interludes of his heroes and heroines, who generally conduct themselves in the same invariably featureless fashion, and do not, as a rule, play a more important part in his narration than that of pawns in a game of chess. With him, romance was not primarily the romance of love, but the general romance of human life, of the world and its activities, and, more especially, of the warring, adventurous and, more or less, strange and curiosity-provoking past. For achieving his best effects, he required a period removed, if even a little less than “sixty years since,” from his own, a period contrasting more or less strongly, but in, at least, a great variety of ways, with it; and he depended largely on the curiosity latent, if not active, in most persons, about old-time fashions, manners, modes of life, personal characteristics and, more especially, dangers and adventures.
“No fresher paintings of Nature,” says Carlyle, “can be found than Scott’s; hardly anywhere a wider sympathy with man”; but he affirms that, while
Yet, as a delineator of character, he has his strong points. He had thoroughly studied the lowland Scot. If, not knowing Gaelic, he never properly understood the Highlander, and portrays mainly his superficial peculiarities arising from an imperfect command of lowland Scots and a comparative ignorance of the arts of civilised life—portrays him as the foreigner is usually portrayed in English novels—he knew his lowland Scot as few have ever known him. Here are “no deceptively painted automatons,” but “living men and women.” He is more especially successful with the Scot of the humble or burgher class, and with Scottish eccentrics gentle or simple. Jeanie Deans and her Cameronian father David, the theologically dull but practically wide-awake ploughman Cuddie Headrigg and his fanatic mother the covenanting Mause, Meg Merrilies, even if she be a little stagey, the border farmer, Dandie Dinmont, Dominie Sampson, Ritt Master Dalgetty, Baillie Nicol Jarvie, the bedesman Edie Ochiltree, that pitiable victim of litigation, the irrepressible Peter Peebles, the Antiquary himself—these and such as these are all immortals. His success with such characters was primarily owing to his genial intercourse with all classes and his peculiar sense of humour. In depicting eccentrics or persons with striking idiosyncrasies, or those in the lower ranks of life, he displays at once an amazing fecundity and a well-nigh matchless efficacy. Here, he has a supremacy hardly threatened amongst English writers even by Dickens, for, unlike Dickens, he is never fantastic or extravagant. If not so mirth-provoking as Dickens, he is, in his humourous passages, quite as entertaining, and his eccentrics never, as those of Dickens often do, tax our belief in their possible existence. As a humourist, his one drawback—a drawback which, with many, prevents an adequate appreciation of his merits—is that his most characteristic creations generally express themselves in a dialect the idiomatic niceties of which can be fully appreciated only by Scotsmen, and not now by every one of that nationality.