Scott
Walter Scott’s Fair Maid of Perth is excellent, is it not? There is finish! there is a hand! What a firm foundation for the whole, and in particular not a touch which does not lead to the goal! Then, what details of dialogue and description, both of which are excellent. His scenes and situations are like pictures by Teniers; in the arrangement they show the summit of art, the individual figures have a speaking truth, and the execution is extended with artistic love to the minutest details, so that not a stroke is lost.
You find everywhere in Walter Scott a remarkable security and thoroughness in his delineation, which proceeds from his comprehensive knowledge of the real world, obtained by life-long studies and observations, and a daily discussion of the most important relations. Then come his great talent and his comprehensive nature. You remember the English critic who compares the poets to the voices of singers, of which some can command only a few fine tones, while others have the whole compass, from the highest to the lowest, completely in their power. Walter Scott is one of this last sort. In the Fair Maid of Perth you will not find a single weak passage to make you feel as if his knowledge and talent were insufficient. He is equal to his subject in every direction in which it takes him; the king, the royal brother, the prince, the head of the clergy, the nobles, the magistracy, the citizens and mechanics, the Highlanders, are all drawn with the same sure hand, and hit off with equal truth.
The passage where the prince, sitting on horseback, makes the pretty minstrel girl step upon his foot, that he may raise her up for a kiss, is in the boldest English style. But you ladies are wrong always to take sides. Usually, you read a book to find nutrition for the heart, to find a hero whom you could love. This is not the way to read; the great point is not whether this or that character pleases, but whether the whole book pleases.
But, when you have finished the Fair Maid of Perth, you must at once read Waverley, which is written from quite a different point of view, but which may, without hesitation, be set beside the best works that have ever been written in this world. We see that it is the same man who wrote the Fair Maid of Perth, but that he has yet to gain the favor of the public, and therefore collects his forces so that he may not give a touch that is short of excellence. The Fair Maid of Perth, on the other hand, is from a freer pen; the author is now sure of his public, and he proceeds more at liberty. After reading Waverley, you will understand why Walter Scott still designates himself the author of that work; for there he showed what he could do, and he has never since written anything to surpass, or even equal, that first published novel.
Walter Scott is a great genius; he has not his equal; and we need not wonder at the extraordinary effect he produces on the whole reading world. He gives me much to think of; and I discover in him a wholly new art, with laws of its own.
We read far too many poor things, thus losing time, and gaining nothing. We should only read what we admire, as I did in my youth, and as I now experience with Sir Walter Scott. I have just begun Rob Roy, and will read his best novels in succession. All is great—material, import, characters, execution; and then what infinite diligence in the preparatory studies! what truth of detail in the execution! We see, too, what English history is; and what a thing it is when such an inheritance falls to the lot of a clever poet. Our German history, in five volumes, is, on the other hand, sheer poverty.
It is a peculiarity of Walter Scott’s that his great talent in representing details often leads him into faults. Thus, in Ivanhoe, there is a scene where they are seated at a table in a castle-hall at night, and a stranger enters. Now, he is quite right in describing the stranger’s appearance and dress, but it is a fault that he goes to the length of describing his feet, shoes, and stockings. When we sit down in the evening, and some one comes in, we see only the upper part of his body. If I describe the feet, daylight enters at once, and the scene loses its nocturnal character.
Footnotes
13 Goethe had been reproached “for not taking up arms in the German War of Liberation, or at least coöperating as a poet.”
14 “Architecture is music in space, as it were a frozen music.”—Schelling’s Philosophie der Kunst.