LITMIR.BIZ

      SCOTT'S REBECCA AND ROWENA, AND LUCY ASHTON

      IT is not only in her conscientious explanation of the "Mysteries of Udolpho" that Mrs. Radcliffe pays tribute to the realistic ideal of her time. Her romances are as chaste in motive and as modest in material as Jane Austen's novels, and far decenter than most novels of any age. They might be blamed for their blending of sublimity and absurdity, but there is no specious mixture of good and bad in them to confound the conscience by the spectacle of noble rascality or virtuous depravity in any form. One may squander one's time on them, but one cannot get positive harm from them. They may misrepresent manners, but they do not misrepresent morals; and in their idyllic passages, such as that episode of the pastor La Luc in "The Romance of the Forest," they are refining, and even edifying. It is hard not to wish a little to be like Mrs. Radcliffe's good people, and one never wishes to be like her bad people. The love-making between her heroes and heroines is of virginal purity; the heroine is always a Nice Girl, just as a heroine of Jane Austen or Frances Burney is, even if she is not a Real Girl; and it is to be claimed for Anne Radcliffe that she too helped with the other great women authors of her time to characterize Anglo-Saxon fiction with decency. When the magic wand fell from her hold, it passed to the keeping of a man whose ideal was as high and pure as her own.

      I

      So far as any man may he said to invent anything, Walter Scott invented the historical novel. His fiction drew upon the life of the past for characters and events, which he colored and shaped and posed to serve the ends of a fancied scheme. Historical personages had been used before his time, as in those monstrous and tedious fables classified in the annals of fiction as the heroical romances. Many Asian and African princes, wondrously translated, figure in the illimitable pages of Gomberville, Calprenade, and Scuderi; the rival families of Granada, after valiant service in the supposititious Spanish chronicles, were made to amuse the vast leisure of the ladies and gentlemen of Louis XIV. 's court by the same authors. But these authors took liberties with the originals of their creations such as Scott never allowed himself. He did not mind forcing a civilization in the hot-bed of his fancy, or transposing the peculiarities of one epoch to another; but he kept a fairly good conscience as to personality, and his historical characters realize in reasonable measure the ideal of tradition, if not of veritable record.

      His evolution as a historical novelist reveals the simplicity of his nature and the open-hearted directness of his aim so winningly that you love the man more and more, while you respect the artist less and less. It is not that in going from the desultory Scotch stories he began with to the English, Continental, and Oriental motives he ended with, he did not learn something more of form and effect. But what he gained in these, he lost in more vital things. He no longer wrote of what he knew and believed in, but what he studied and made-believe in. His earlier Scotch stories show his wish for truth to life, not only in the facts which he accumulates in prefaces and notes to attest the verity of the incidents, but in those finer things which the heart of the reader best corroborates. This wish was the principle of the realists whom he followed and surpassed in the popular favor, with a frank and generous shame for his triumph; but when he abandoned his native ground in the fear he so single-heartedly owns that his readers must get tired of his Scotch stories if he kept on with them, he did not perhaps abandon this principle, but he abandoned the best means of fulfilling it. He was a great literary force; he had got an immense creative impetus, and he could not help doing things that attracted and interested, but it must be confessed that he weakened more and more in the power of doing things that convinced. The early Scotch stories are those which his grown-up readers have not tired of; while all but boys and girls (and rather young boys and girls) have tired of the romances which he forsook them for. In these the characters degenerate into types, heroic, hollow, that resound with echoing verbiage, and personate one quality and tendency. This seems to me especially true of the women, or the types of women, who are what he makes them, not what he finds them. He clothes them in certain attributes, as he habits them in certain garments, and he appoints them certain ceremonial relations to the facts which are mostly outside of the real drama, or inessential to it. In " Ivanhoe " the action scarcely concerns either Rebecca or Rowena; the lovemaking, so far as there is any, is between Rebecca and Ivanhoe, and yet Ivanhoe placidly marries Rowena, with whom he has, to the reader's knowledge, not made love at all. In fiction women exist in the past, present, or future tenses, the infinitive, indicative, potential, or imperative moods of lovemaking; otherwise they do not exist at all, and no phantom of delight, masquerading in their clothes, suffices. Both Rowena and Rebecca might be left out of ''Ivanhoe,"

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