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:
           The hero is a sneaking piece of imbecility, and if he had married Flora, she would have set him
           up upon the chimney piece, as Count Borowlaski’s wife used to do with him.

           As for the heroines, their main fault is their faultlessness; they do and say nothing that provokes
           criticism; and he is more careful that we should respect and admire than understand them.
           Catherine Seton is clever, witty and sprightly. Diana Vernon is rendered interesting by her
           peculiar surroundings, and, though in a quite ingenuous fashion, verges on unconventionality.
           Julia Mannering, Lucy Bertram, Flora Mac-Ivor, Edith Bellenden, Miss Wardour are all
           charming in a slightly different fashion from each other; but little more than the surface of their
           natures is revealed to us. On account of the peculiar prominence of the love episode in The
           Bride of Lammermoor, and its strong tragic characteristics, some have been inclined to
           pronounce this novel Scott’s masterpiece; but, while the tragic painfulness of portions of the
           novel is undeniable, and no small art is shown in creating a general atmosphere of tragic gloom
           and conveying a sense of impending calamity, its tragic greatness is another matter. The chief
           personalities hardly possess the qualities needful for evoking the highest form of tragic pathos.
           The almost ludicrous subjection of Sir William to his masterful wife is a serious hindrance to the
           achievement of the desired effect; while, again, disgust at her besotted prejudice and narrow,
           stolid pride tends to prevent us from being roused to any other emotion as to its consequences.
           Then, Lucy Ashton is too weak to win our full sympathy; and her sudden lunacy and mad
           murderous act shock, rather than impress, us; while, on the other hand, Ravenswood is at
           once too readily conciliatory and too darkly fierce. And, even if the tragic elements were better
           compounded than they are, the novel, in other respects, is decidedly inferior to the best of his
           productions. It has very patent faults—sufficiently accounted for by Scott’s condition of almost
           perpetual torture when he wrote it—and, except in the case of the weird crones, displays less
           than his usual graphic felicity in the portrayal of Scottish characters, Caleb Balderstone, for
           example, being a rather wearisome caricature, and the wit expended on his ingenious devices
           to hide the extreme destitution of his master’s larder being of the very cheapest kind.

           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
           Shakespeare fashions his characters from the heart outwards, your Scott fashions them from
           the skin inwards, never getting near the heart of them! The one set become living men and
           women, the other amount to little more than mechanical cases, deceptively painted
           automatons.

           Though a characteristically exaggerated pronouncement, it is undeniable that there is a
           soupçon of truth in it. Scott would have been the last to liken himself to Shakespeare as a
           delineator of character. He is a little lacking in depth and subtlety; he has an eye mainly for
           strongly marked characteristics, and certain of his personages are but superficially delineated.
           He makes no special intellectual or moral demands on us, as does, for example, Meredith or
           Thackeray; he had little sense of the finer shades, as had Jane Austen; and he cannot quite
           compare with Carlyle in the portrayal of historic personages. Further, it is a notable
           circumstance that few or none of his personages develop under his hands; for the most part,
           they are, throughout the narrative, exhibited with characteristics which are unmodified by time,
           experience or events. To analyse character was, in fact, as little his aim, as it was to
           promulgate any special social dogma. As Carlyle laments, he was not “possessed with an
           idea”; but, however predominant and effective a part ideas may play in modern drama and
           fiction, they have their disadvantages; they are apt to prove rather a hindrance than an aid to
           more than temporary success in the more creative forms of literature. That Scott was not
           actuated by any more special purpose than that of giving delight to his readers may even be
           reckoned one of the chief sources of his charm and of the widely beneficent influence he
           exercises. He attracts us mainly by an exhibition of the multifarious pageantry of life; or, as
           Carlyle puts it, his was “a genius in extenso, as we may say, not in intenso.”

           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.
 
 
 
 
 
 

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