Complete Fictional Works of John Buchan (Illustrated)

by John Buchan

  On the other hand it seems to me that the staple of his writing, even when he is least inspired, is sound and workmanlike. He is a master of easy, swift, lucid narrative, and he invented a mode of speech for the figures of past ages which is at once romantic and natural. His style is far more varied than appears at first sight, and, just as in his lyrics he could pass from the trumpets of war to the pipes of faery, so in his prose he can sometimes attain a haunting simplicity and grace, as in the narrative of Chrystal Croftangry and in a hundred passages in the Journal. But the true defence looks not to the levels but to the heights. As Dryden said of Shakespeare, he is always great when some great occasion is presented to him. When the drama quickens and the stage darkens he attains to a style as perfect and unforgettable as Shakespeare’s, and it is most cunningly compounded. It is never “precious,” but it is often beyond price. On such occasions he gives us harmonies as subtle and moving as can be found in the whole range of English prose, where every cadence, every epithet, every object mentioned plays its due part in the total impression. I need only cite the speech of Meg Merrilies to the laird of Ellangowan, Claverhouse’s speech to Morton, Habakkuk Mucklewrath’s denunciation of Claverhouse, the last chapters of The Bride of Lammermoor, “Wandering Willie’s Tale,” and the closing scene of Redgauntlet. Such passages are worth the patient, imaginative analysis which we give to the choruses of Æschylus.

  On one point there is no dispute, the complete rightness of the speech of his Scots characters. Scott used the dialect of the Lothians with a slight Border admixture — that is to say, metropolitan Scots, the classic language of Scottish gentlefolk and peasants. Twice he permitted himself an experiment in the Aberdeen version — with Francie Macraw in The Antiquary and with Davie Dingwall in The Bride of Lammermoor. He varied the vernacular to suit his characters. Sometimes it is standard English with a delicate northern colouring; sometimes it broadens into robust idioms, though it is never permitted to become an unintelligible clot of dialect. At great moments, as with Meg Merrilies and Jeanie Deans and Steenie Steenson, it has the high simplicity of the universal. One point is worth noting. He understood the undercurrent of rhythm in the vernacular, and half his felicities come from this submerged music, these repetitive dactyls and trochees and anapaests, which have both the hammer-strokes of prose and the lilt of poetry.

  II

  [Structure]

  From verbal style we pass to structure. It is important to remember the conditions under which the novels were produced. Scott wrote them, as Shakespeare wrote his plays, in the intervals of a busy life, and the amount of time available for the actual work of scribing was strictly limited. But the theme was always in his head; he has told us that he was never consciously inventing and never not inventing; as he sat in court, or walked the Edinburgh streets, or rode about the Forest, he was perpetually slipping over the frontier of his secret world; he would have agreed with Bagehot, who wrote “There is no time for quiet reflection like the intervals of the hunt.” The hour before rising, too, he usually gave up to a forecast of the morning’s work. Apart from details, he did not compose at his desk. The stories built themselves up half-unconsciously in his mind, while his fancy ran free. Hence his structure was not an artificial thing beaten out by laborious cogitation, but an organic development proceeding slowly and naturally like the growth of a tree. In none of the greater novels are we offended by any jerking of the wires.

  This structure is sometimes defective, chiefly because Scott was in too great a hurry to get on with the story. Stevenson has noted an instance in the “recognition” scene in Guy Mannering when Harry Bertram lands at Ellangowan and hears the tune on the flageolet. There Scott has omitted to prepare the reader’s mind for certain details, and he does it in haste with a sentence clumsily interpolated. Sometimes he brings an episode to a huddled conclusion, and now and then there is a grave lack of proportion. The novel, when he wrote, was still in process of changing from the rambling, inconsequent, picaresque tradition. But it may be said on the other hand that the main drama is nearly always well shaped, though that drama is not always coterminous with the whole story. The novels, it seems to me, do in a large measure achieve an artistic unity. Scott’s purpose is always to present the manifold of experience winnowed and sifted and free of inessentials. He was not content, as many of the great Russians have been content, to produce a huge mass of the data of fiction, on which the shaping spirit of imagination only works at intervals. Can it be denied that much of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky has a scientific rather than an artistic interest? There are moving “plays within the play,” but the whole is formless because it is not wrought to the human scale. It is no justification to say that it is life; a novelist does not transcribe, he creates life; life is not art till it is moulded and clarified, it is only art’s raw material. Unity of impression is essential for the whole and not merely for episodes. If the scale is too grandiose and the complexities too many, the result may be a contribution to knowledge, but it cannot make that single, undivided and intense impression which is the aim of the artist. Mere mass and intricacy are valueless unless transfused and transformed by the creative mind; otherwise an interminable Alexandrian epic would transcend the Iliad, and a sprawling mediæval romaunt would be ranked above Chaucer.

  [Scott’s padding]

  A common charge against the structure of the novels is their longueurs and excessive padding, and up to a point the charge is just. Scott did not write with a narrow thesis, and therefore he is loath to discard what interests him, even if its relevance is not very clear. His affection was so pledged to his characters and their doings that he is apt to linger with them in side-walks. But the complaint may easily be overdone. Do Scott’s irrelevancies ever reach the heights of tediousness which we find in some of the greatest of his successors — in War and Peace, for example, with its roods of amateur military discussion and its acres of turgid pamphleteering? May not his longueurs, too, have an artistic value? In his review of Jane Austen he wrote: —

  Let any one cut out from the Iliad or from Shakespeare’s plays everything ... which is absolutely devoid of importance or interest in itself; and he will find that what is left will have lost more than half its charm. We are convinced that some writers have diminished the effect of their works by being scrupulous to admit nothing into them which had not some absolute, intrinsic, and independent merit. They have acted like those who strip off the leaves of a fruit-tree, as being of themselves good for nothing, with the view of securing more nourishment to the fruit, which in fact cannot attain its full maturity and flower without them.

  The metaphor is perhaps not exact, but there is justice in the point. Scott’s padding, antiquarian and otherwise, provides relief, a rest for the mind, in the midst of exciting action.

  Something of the same kind may be said in defence of his stockish heroes and heroines, who should properly be considered as part of the structure of the tale, rather than studies in character. They are passive people for the most part, creatures of the average world, not majestic men and women of destiny. But they are not unreal, for the earth is full of them; they are the more natural for being undistinguished. They seem to me to play on the whole a vital artistic part, for there is such a thing as too stimulating fare. They form a solid background, a kind of Greek chorus repeating all the accepted platitudes, and keeping the drama, which might otherwise become fantastic, within reach of our prosaic life.

  [The meaning of romance]

  The point is worth dwelling on, for it is bound up with the meaning of romance. It is one of Scott’s characteristics that, though sympathizing in every fibre with the coloured side of life, with man’s exaltations and agonies, he feels bound to let common sense put in its word now and then, to let the voice be heard of the normal pedestrian world. In a great painting, as has often been pointed out, there is always some prosaic object which provides a point of rest for the eye, and without which the whole value of the picture would be altered. This duty is perfo
rmed in literature by the ordinary man, by Kent in Lear, by Horatio in Hamlet, by Banquo in Macbeth; they are, so to speak, the “eye” of the storm which rages about them, and serve to measure the departure of the others from virtue, sanity, moderation, or merely normal conduct. Each is like the centre of a great wheel, which has little movement in itself but controls the furious revolutions of the circumference. This punctum indifferens is the peaceful anchorage of good sense from which we are able to watch with a balanced mind the storm outside. No great art is without it. Scott never loses his head, and the artistic value is as undeniable as the moral value. The fantastic, the supernatural and the quixotic are heightened in their effect by being shown against this quiet background; moreover, they are made credible by being thus linked to our ordinary world. Behind all the extravagance we feel the Scots lawyer considering his case; we hear a voice like Dr Johnson’s reminding us that somewhere order reigns. If we compare Scott with Victor Hugo we shall understand the difference made by the lack of this quality. For the great Frenchman there is no slackening of the rein, no lowering of the top-note, till the steed faints from exhaustion and the strident voice ceases to impress our dulled ears.

  A consequence of this gift of central steadfastness is Scott’s skill in anti-climax, which, like the “falling close” in a lyric, does not weaken but increases the effect. Like the Gifted Gilfillan in Waverley he can pass easily and naturally from the New Jerusalem of the Saints to the price of beasts at Mauchline Fair. In previous chapters I have given instances of this breaking in upon romance of a voice from the common world, which does not weaken the heroic, but brings it home. Without some such salt of the pedestrian, romance becomes only a fairy-tale, and tragedy a high-heeled strutting. The kernel of romance is contrast, beauty and valour flowering in unlikely places, the heavenly rubbing shoulders with the earthly. The true romantic is never the posturing Byronic hero. All romance, all tragedy, must be within hailing distance of our humdrum lives, and anti-climax is a necessary adjunct to climax. We find it in the Ballads — this startling note of common sense, the sense of the commonalty, linking fact and dream. We find it in Shakespeare, who can make Cleopatra pass from banter with a peasant to the loftiest of human soliloquies.—”Hast thou the pretty worm of Nilus there? ... Those that do die of it do seldom or never recover.... I wish you joy o’ the worm.” And then: —

  Give me my robe, put on my crown; I have

  Immortal longings in me.

  We find it in Scott, whose broad sane vision saw that tragedy and comedy are sisters, and that, like Antaeus, neither can live without the touch of her mother, the earth.

  III

  [His characters]

  The staple of the novelist’s task is the understanding and presentation of human character. How does Scott fare when judged by this test?

  Badly, says Carlyle. “Your Shakespeare fashions his characters from the heart outwards; your Scott fashions them from the skin inwards, never getting near the heart of them.” Bagehot after his fashion puts the charge precisely, when he finds Scott weak in his treatment of two of the deepest human interests, love and religion.

  It is important to recognize frankly Scott’s limitations. “Everything worth while,” said Nietzsche, “is accomplished notwithstanding”; we cannot rightly measure a man’s powers till we know what he cannot do. Scott’s world was a very large and rich one, larger and richer perhaps than that of any other novelist, but it had its boundaries. We may put his heroes and heroines aside, for they are not characters in the true sense of the word; as we have seen, they are rather part of the staging and the scenery; their fault is that, except in a few cases like Croftangry, the drama is not seen through their eyes, and they are far inferior in insight and power to the imaginary narrator. For the rest, Scott’s world was one in which things worked out normally by some law of averages, where goodness was on the whole rewarded and evil punished, a friendly universe not commonly at war with human aspirations. It was a world not grievously perturbed by thought, and there was little room in it for figures of profound intellectual or moral subtlety. The struggles of the twilight of the soul did not interest him. He could not draw the Hamlet type as Shakespeare and Tourgeniev could draw it, though in Conachar in the Fair Maid of Perth he comes near it. Nor could he have given us, even if he had wished to, any penetrating studies in the religious consciousness. The saint in the narrower sense, a figure like Dostoevsky’s Alyosha or Prince Myshkin, was outside his experience and his comprehension. Nor was he capable of penetrating, like Proust, into the submarine jungle of the half-conscious.

  Again, he is no great exponent of the female mind and temperament — in his own class, that is to say, for the criticism is certainly not true of his peasants. For women he had an old-fashioned reverence and regarded them very much as a toast to be drunk after king and constitution. With the nuances of feminine character he was little concerned, and towards high passion between gentlefolk he showed always a certain timidity and repugnance. He was incapable of delving in the psychology of sex, since he felt it ill-bred to pry into matters which a gentleman does not talk about in public; an intimate study of the matter would have been impossible for him without a dereliction of standards. Even had he tried he would most certainly have failed, for he recognized that his “big bow-wow strain” was an impossible medium. We may well agree with Bagehot’s pontifical sentences. “The same blunt sagacity of imagination, which fitted him to excel in the rough description of obvious life, rather unfitted him for delineating the less substantial essence of the female character. The nice minutiæ of society, by means of which female novelists have been so successful in delineating their own sex, were rather too much for his robust and powerful mind.” Woman — cultivated, gently-born woman — remained for him a toast.

  What do these admissions amount to? That his knowledge and imaginative understanding of life had its limits — which is true of every writer that ever lived, even of Shakespeare; that with certain rare types of character, in which Shakespeare excelled, he must have failed; that he regarded gentlewomen with too respectful an eye. Not, assuredly, that the interest of the novels depends only on costume, and that the characters are drawn from the skin inwards, and have no souls. Within the wide range of his understanding Scott drew character with a firmness, a subtlety, a propriety, which are not easy to match. He has given us a gallery of living three-dimensioned figures, who are as completely realized in their minds as they are vividly depicted in their bodies. Carlyle chose a bad test for his denigratory comparison, for Scott’s method is pre-eminently the method of Shakespeare. Neither peeps and botanizes and flourishes the scalpel; they make their characters reveal themselves by their speech and deeds in the rough contacts of life.

  The two are alike in another point — their attitude towards sex. They are not obsessed by it; no more than the other great writers of the world do they pretend that the relations of man and woman are the only things of first-class importance, and that the only real tragedy is a disastrous love affair. The solitary love tragedy in the Iliad is the story of Anteia and Bellerophon, and it occupies six lines out of fifteen thousand. They would have agreed with Dr Johnson that “poetry is not often worse employed than in dignifying the amorous fury of a raving girl.” Few of Shakespeare’s greatest plays deal with love in the ordinary sense, and the reason given by Johnson was that “love has no great influence on the sum of life.” Scott might have qualified this dictum, but he would have urged that love was only one among the major influences, and that to pretend otherwise was to make a hothouse of a spacious garden.

  The charge against Scott’s character-drawing made by hasty critics may be due to his avoidance of two habits, which have given certain novelists a specious appearance of profundity. One is the trick of dissecting a character before the reader’s eyes and filling pages with laboured analysis. No doubt a certain amount of analysis is required from the writer, but Scott held it his main business to make men and women reveal themselves by speech an
d action, to play the showman as little as possible, to present a finished product and not to print the jottings of his laboratory. In this he was undoubtedly right if we regard the central purpose of the novel. Much remarkable work has been produced on a different theory, but it seems to me to lie apart from the main high road. The danger before the analyst who is not content to expound his people through action is that he is apt, like Proust and in a lesser degree Henry James, to carry his analysis too far — to reduce his characters to elements too minute for the business of life, and leave them mere nebulæ of whirling atoms. Proust has given us a marvellous world, like some green twilight at the bottom of the ocean, but its dramas cannot move us like the doings of the upper globe, for they lack the larger influences of life. The atoms are too disintegrated to combine. It is fantastic science rather than art.

  [The pathological]

  The other trick which he shuns is the spurious drama which is achieved by a frequent recourse to the pathological. Scott is honourably averse to getting effects by the use of mere ugliness and abnormality. He was perfectly aware of the half-world of the soul and glances at it now and then to indicate its presence, but he held that there were better things to do than to wallow in its bogs. The truth is that the pathological is too easy. Take the case of religious mania, which he sketches in a figure like Ephraim MacBriar. James Hogg has treated the same topic with power and subtlety in his Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, but Scott has given us no such detailed study, since he did not consider that such perversions were of much significance in life.