In the story which resounds with them, there is one young lady who divides the honors of heroine with the gypsy; and in her, for once, Scott is able to impart the charm of a lively girlishness. Julia Mannering is sinuously true, after the manner of her sex, and light of tongue and heart rather than head. She is a genuine personality; and she carries off an impossible part in the plot with so much vivacity and naturalness that one is almost as much in love with her as with any of the ignorant and amusing housewives and farm-bodies.
"Waverley " offers no such figure as this young lady in "Guy Mannering," to my liking. Rose Bradwardine is a nice girl, and fit to be married by a hero who repents being fool enough to have fought for the Pretender. But the farthest stretch of charity cannot find her a character. She does what a young lady ought because she is bidden; her speech is the effect of that ventriloquism which Scott too obviously practiced in speaking his own words from whatever lips were convenient. She is not the worst instrument of this sort; and Flora Mac Ivor is not the most diaphanous of the author's failures to construct a credible image of historic motive and personality. It is not that the sister of a Highland chieftain, supporting the rebellion of Charles Edward Stuart, might not play the part assigned to Flora Mac Ivor; but that she does not play it in a way to make us feel that she is deeply interested in it. We are told much about her, but we are shown very little; and are made witnesses of but one moment of poignant feeling in a woman who must have had many, if she were really a woman. This climax is fitly reached in that last interview of Waverley's with Flora when he finds her sewing upon the shroud of her brother who is about to be executed for treason. Then she blames herself for her brother's doom as something that her own impassioned loyalty to the Stuarts had urged him forward to. She realizes that the cause was always hopeless, and while she still believes it just and sacred, she agonizes at her part in it for her brother's sake. This point is really fine—the finest in a story whose course is loose and straggling, and whose effects have rarely the compactness that deep passion alone can give.
SCOTT'S JEANIE DEANS AND COOPER'S LACK OF HEROINES
THE nature of Scott's heroines is such that the choice of this one or that, as the most representative, is a question of intellectual preference rather than of passion, and could hardly rouse feeling in any but their duly appointed lovers. Fortunately for Scott, he does not live by them; one cannot quite say that without them he would still be one of the greatest novelists, and chief of the great romancers; but one may very safely say that such general impression as one keeps of his fiction is not strengthened by a vivid sense of these ladies. Only now and then, and here and there, are they essential to the lasting effect; one recalls them vaguely and with an effort; they are not voluntarily constant to the fancy like the women of Thackeray, of George Eliot, of Charles Reade, even of Dickens; and of some other more modern novelists, above all Mr. Hardy. In the imaginary world of Scott's creation, woman remained as subordinate as he found her in the civic world about him. He invented a man's world, and perhaps because women did not come into their rights in it, his man's world has now mostly lapsed to a boy's world, where there is little need of the glamour which women cast upon life.
I
I have already noted one chief exception to the prevailing nullity of Scott's heroines in the sad reality of Lucy Ashton, and I shall hardly contrary any critical reader in suggesting Jeanie Deans as another. No characters could well be more strongly contrasted, and one cannot think of them without feeling that in this direction, as in so many others, Scott's performance was a very imperfect measure of his possibility. If he had not been driven to make quantity, what quality might not he have given us! If he had not had the burden of telling a story upon him, how much more he might have told us of life! If he had not felt bound to portray swashbucklers, with what gracious and touching portraits of womanhood might not he have enriched his page! The man himself was so modest and single of heart that the secret of the ever-womanly would gladly have imparted itself to him if he had not been, as it were, too shy to suffer the confidence. Whenever he caught some hint of it by chance, how clearly he set it down! But for the most part, as I have already said, these chances addressed him from low life; gentlewomen seem rarely to have confided their more complex natures to him. For once, indeed, he saw a Lucy Ashton in the plain air of day, where many Lucy Ashtons dwell and have dwelt, and not less importantly he saw Jeanie Deans; but it was more in his way to see such as Jeanie than to see such as Lucy, and I cannot help thinking it was less an achievement to have fixed her presence lastingly in the reader's consciousness.
Such as she is, however, she stands foremost, I believe, in the critical appreciation of Scott's heroines, and it will be useless to oppose the figure of Effie Deans as somewhat unfairly overshadowed by her. Jeanie has the great weight of moral sentiment on her side; and yet I have a fancy that Scott himself, if he could really have been got at, would have owned he thought it a little finer to keep Effie impenitently true to herself throughout than to show Jeanie equal to the burden which her sister's lightness cast upon her. At any rate, it seems to me an effect of great mastery (once more surprising than now) to let us see that Effie was always the same nature, in the shame of her unlawful motherhood, in the stress of her trial for the crime against her child's life which she was guiltless of, in the horror of the scaffold to which she was unjustly doomed, and in the rebound from the danger and disgrace when Jeanie's devotion had won her release from both. She was wrought upon by the passing facts, but not changed in her nature by them, as Jeanie was not changed in hers. We judge one another so inadequately and unfairly in the actual world, however, that beings of the imaginary world must not expect better treatment. There as here, the light nature will be condemned for the deeds done in it as if they were done in a serious nature, and a serious nature will be honored for truth to itself as if it had overcome in this the weakness of a light nature. Especially among all peoples of Anglo- Saxon birth and breeding will the same inflexible measure of morality be applied, and the characterization of one who has done nobly will be thought greater than that of one who has not done nobly.
II
In this I hope I am not giving the notion that I wish to undervalue the character of Jeanie Deans as a piece of art. I value it above that of any other woman, except Lucy Ashton, or except Effie Deans, in all Scott's romances; but that is saying less than I should like in praise of it. Her character grows upon you, as no doubt it grew upon Scott himself, who must have found that he had something constantly greater and truer in hand than he first imagined. The simple girl matures slowly into shapeliness and strength, much as the straggling story of "The Heart of Midlothian" itself does, and it is not till her young sister's misfortune and the suspicion of child-murder begins to blacken about the hapless Effie that Jeanie shows the force of a heroine. She stands nearest the Covenanter conscience of their "dour" old father, and she stands between his conscience and her sister's blame when it comes to that, with a hold upon the reader's heart that tightens to suffocation at that awful moment in court when her helpless truth gives away her sister's life.
The intensity of this feeling for her increases rather than lessens after Effie's sentence, when Jeanie goes up to London, alone and unfriended, to sue for the King's mercy. It is finely shown how she does not change, but enlarges in character to the measure of her tremendous mission. Through all her difficulties and dangers, and in every demand upon her truth to herself and faith in her sister's innocence of the crime which Effie is doomed to die for, she is still the same plain Scotch country body that we saw her at first, of a presence which the author is too wise to flatter. "She was short, and rather too stoutly made for her size, her gray eyes, light- colored hair, a round, good-humored face, much tanned by the sun; and her only peculiar charm was an air of inexpressible serenity, which a good conscience, kind feelings, contented temper and the regular discharge of all her duties, spread over her features." In this figure she visits the Duke of Argyle, the embodiment to her unworldliness of all worldly greatness under royalty, and wins his promise to help her see the King. Not only her calm, wholesome goodness, her sore-tried love for her sister, and her innocent naivete appear
