Cruel! what traitor could thee hither bring? XXXVIII 'My Madeline! sweet dreamer! lovely bride! Say, may I be for aye thy vassal blest? Thy beauty's shield, heart-shap'd and vermeil dyed ? Ah, silver shrine, here will I take my rest After so many hours of toil and quest, A famish'd pilgrim,-sav'd by miracle. Though I have found, I will not rob thy nest Saving of thy sweet self; if thou think'st well To trust, fair Madeline, to no rude infidel. 121 XXXIX 'Hark! 'tis an elfin-storm from faery land, For o'er the southern moors I have a home for thee.' XL She hurried at his words, beset with fears, For there were sleeping dragons all around, At glaring watch, perhaps, with ready spears— Down the wide stairs a darkling way they found.- 130 140 A chain-droop'd lamp was flickering by each door; And the long carpets rose along the gusty floor. XLI They glide, like phantoms, into the wide hall; The wakeful bloodhound rose, and shook his hide, By one, and one, the bolts full easy slide :- XLII And they are gone: aye, ages long ago These lovers fled away into the storm. That night the Baron dreamt of many a woe, And all his warrior-guests, with shade and form 150 160 CHAPTER XII THE NOVELISTS AMONG the many diversities and variations of the eighteenth-century novel there are two types which alternately influenced the generations that followed. The novels of Fielding are on the epic scale; each contains material for a dozen stories of our modern dimensions; they range over a wide expanse of country, and pass with a free step from character-study to romance, and from picaresque incident to heroic adventure. The novels of Goldsmith and Madame D'Arblay lie in a more restricted field: they are concerned with narrower issues and more concentrated topics; the episodes are more carefully selected and more closely related to a single plot. In the fiction of the early nineteenth century the one tendency is represented by Scott and the other by Jane Austen. Scott is the natural successor of Fielding. He inherits an even broader realm, he administers it with the same policy of sympathy and toleration. Indeed, the only restriction which we can place on his genius is to say that it is most successful amid scenes and characters with which he is personally familiar. His English novels, his stories of foreign romance, strike us in the main as extraordinarily able tours de force: the Scottish part of Rob Roy is worth ten of the English; and even masterpieces like Ivanhoe and The Talisman are masterpieces on the outside; they have not the natural intimate spontaneity of The Antiquary and Old Mortality, and Wandering Willie's tale in Redgauntlet. In his own domain he is unsurpassed. His breadth of interest, his catholic sympathy, his humour-the kindliest in all literature-not only hold our attention, but awaken us to a sense of personal regard and love. Precisians have told us that his style is slipshod, and have accounted for this by the haste at which his work was written 1. The fact is that he had two styles. In descriptive passages, and especially in the introductions and settings of his narrative, he often adopted a conventional 'romantic' manner which sat uneasily upon him and which moves with a certain want of grace and elasticity. In dialogue he has all the careless ease of good conversation: it is direct, picturesque, full of warmth and colour, which more than atones-if indeed atonement were needed-for an occasional lapse from strict accuracy. His portraits of his own countrymen are admirable :-Edie Ochiltree and Monkbarns, Captain Dugald Dalgetty, Baillie Nicol Jarvie, Cuddie Headrigg and his mother-these and a hundred others are among the permanent possessions of our art. Grant that the workmanship is unequal, that towards the end there are evidences of the tired hand and the overwrought brain, there is no fear of the verdict if posterity judges him by his best. In Jane Austen's work there is no such inequality. Readers will always find preferences among her six novels, most will probably assign the first place to Pride and Prejudice 2: but through all alike there is the same perfection of finish and almost the same subtlety of insight. Her style is as delicate as the wash of a water-colour: not a stroke is misplaced, not a brush-mark is over-prominent. Her humour, In his manuscript there are often many pages together without a single correction. 2 Macaulay assigned it to Mansfield Park. at its broadest in Miss Bates and Mr. Collins, is often so demure that you read the page twice over to make certain that she intended the jest. Her character drawing is wonderfully just and accurate, set in a comparatively narrow range, but placed and developed with an unerring hand. She_particularly excels in the delineation of women-Emma, for instance, and Elinor Dashwood, and Elizabeth Bennet, who is the most charming of them all-yet if her men are somewhat stiff and patronising, we have reason to believe that so were their prototypes. Above all, she has a sense of proportion which sees each incident in its exact relation to the story as a whole. The private theatricals in Mansfield Park are as tragic as the breakfast scene in Eugénie Grandet: we tell ourselves that the matter is of little moment, but we do not think it so while we read it. Charlotte Brontë complained of her that she does not 'stir the blood': but this only means that her world is gentler than the world of Jane Eyre and of Shirley, and of that grim and saturnine masterpiece Wuthering Heights'. Her genius is quiet not cautious, serene not timid, and its lightest creations are made significant by the perspective in which they are displayed. The names of Dickens and Thackeray have come down to us as correlatives: they support each other like Pitt and Fox, or Disraeli and Gladstone. But each stood on his own feet, and each was enough to make memorable the fiction of our mid-century. Dickens is described once for all in Fitzgerald's inspired phrase 'a cockney Shakespeare'. He works in a less precious metal: there is too much horseplay in Pickwick, Little Nell is intolerable; one of the novels is called Our Mutual Friend-he gives a hundred hostages to criticism if it choose to enforce its claim. But he possessed two essential 1 By Charlotte Brontë's younger sister Emily. |