but there are charming hints of the Scotch canniness which qualifies and quickens her virtues, if it is indeed not one of them.
'"I wad hae putten on a cap, sir,' said Jeanie, when Argyle bids her go dressed as she is to the audience he has got for her, ' but your honor knows it isna the fashion of my country for single women; and I judged that being sae mony hundred miles frae home, your Grace's heart wad warm to the tartan,' looking at the comer of her plaid. 'You judged quite right,' said the Duke. ' Macallumore's heart will be as cold as death can make it, when it does not warm to the tartan. Now, go away, and do not be out of the way when I send.' 'There is little fear of that, sir. . . . But if I might say to your gracious honor, that if ye ever condescend to speak to ony ane that is of greater degree than yoursel', though maybe it isna civil in me to say sae, just if ye wad think there canna be any sic odds as between poor Jeanie Deans of St. Leonard's and the Duke of Argyle; and so dinna be chappit back or cast down by the first rough answer!' 'I am not apt,' said the Duke, laughing, ' to mind rough answers much. ... I will do my best, but God has the hearts of kings in His own hand.' "
The incidents of Jeanie's audience with Caroline, whom the girl does not know for the Queen till the end, when Caroline gives her a little needle-book for remembrance, are of note too common for reproduction; but I like so much a pretty touch in her ensuing conversation with Argyle, that I wish I could believe myself the first to feel it. "'And that leddy was the Queen hersel'?' said Jeanie. 'I misdoubted it when I saw your honor didna put on your hat.' 'It was certainly Queen Caroline. . . . Have you no curiosity to see what is in the little pocket-book?' ' Do you think the pardon icill be in it?' said Jeanie with the eager animation of hope. ' Why, no. . . . They seldom carry these things about them . . . and besides, her Majesty told you it was the King, not she, who was to grant it.' ' That is true,' said Jeanie, ' but I am so confused in my mind.
In such slight things, such casual, lateral touches, the master shows himself rather than in what Scott called "the big bow-bow," and abandoned himself to, alas! so much, because the big bow-bow is so pleasing. A student of human nature will find more of Jeanie in these than in the signal moments of the story where she has the heroine's official part to play; as he will find more of Effie in her flying with her lover, when her pardon comes, without staying Jeanie's return, than in the incidents of her imprisonment and trial. It is from a yet deeper and bolder knowledge of the heart that the author ventures to show, when Effie is married and comes back a lady of rank to visit poor Jeanie, that they both perceive how little they have in common, and willingly part again. Still, that is a great scene, a piece of mighty drama, at the trial, when Jeanie is called to testify concerning Effie under the atrocious law which judged the mother guilty of her child's death if this happened because she had not sought the needed help in the hour of her agony and dishonor. It was the hope of the defense that Effie might be shown to have trusted Jeanie with her secret, and "the poor prisoner instantly started up, and stretched herself half-way over the bar, toward the side at which her sister was to enter. And when, slowly following the official, the witness advanced to the foot of the table, Effie, with the whole expression of her countenance altered from that of confused shame and dismay to an eager, imploring and almost ecstatic earnestness of entreaty, with outstretched hand, hair streaming back, eyes raised eagerly to her sister's face and glistening through tears, exclaimed, in a tone that went to the heart of all who heard her,' O, Jeanie, Jeanie, save me, save me!' . . . Old Deans drew himself still further back under cover of the bench so that . . . his venerable form was no longer visible." Fairbrother, Effie's counsel, "saw the necessity of letting the witness compose herself. In his heart he suspected that she came to bear false witness in her sister's cause. . . . He asked whether she had not remarked her sister's state of health to be altered. 'And she told you the cause of it, my dear, I suppose? . . . Take courage,— speak out.' 'I asked her,' replied Jeanie, 'what ailed her', 'Very well—take your own time—and what was the answer she made?' . . . Jeanie was silent, and looked deadly pale. It was not that she ai any one instant entertained an idea of the possibility of prevarication—it was the natural hesitation to extinguish the last spark of hope that remained for her sister. 'Take courage, young woman,' said Fairbrother. 'I asked what she said ailed her when you inquired.' 'Nothing,' answered Jeanie, with a faint voice which was yet distinctly heard in the most distant corner of the courtroom, such an awful and profound silence had been preserved. . . . Fairbrother's countenance fell. . . . ' Nothing? True, you mean nothing at first, but when you asked her again, did she not tell you what ailed her?' The question was put in a tone meant to make her comprehend the importance of her answer. . . With less pause than at first, she now replied, ' Alack, alack! she never breathed a word to me about it.' A deep groan passed through the court. It was echoed by one deeper and more agonized from the unfortunate father . . . and the venerable old man fell forward senseless . . . with his head at the foot of his terrified daughter. . . . The unfortunate prisoner . . . strove with the guards. . . . 'Let me gang to my father! I will gang to him! He is dead—he is killed —I hae killed him!' Even in this moment of agony Jeanie did not lose that superiority which a deep and firm mind assures to its possessor. . . . 'He is my father—he is our father,' she mildly repeated to those who endeavored to separate them, as she stooped, shaded aside his gray hairs and began assiduously to chafe his temples."
III
The loose, inaccurate and ineffectual languaging of this scene is partially concealed by the condensation of the foregoing passages. I know that to many it will seem irreverence little short of sacrilege to speak of Scott's work in these terms; but truth is more precious than sentiment, and no harm but much help can come from recognizing the facts. In verse, Scott was a master of diction, compact, clear, simple; in prose, at least the prose of his novels, he was shapeless, tautological, heavy, infirm, wandering, melodramatic and over-literary. The incident, however, is here so nobly imagined that the reader is held above the course of its feeble and inadequate realization, and shares with the author in the greatness of his concept. It is quite useless to pretend otherwise, and one has only to think how Tolstoy, for instance, or Turgenev would have presented the scene, in order to feel the vast imperfection, the deficiency in surplus, of Scott's treatment. But the world has done him justice, in such things, and where his idea is great, it has measured him by the affluence of his concept, and not by the poverty of his product.
He was of an age which was over-literary, and which the influence of his error was making more and more so. His error was not wholly his; it was largely the effect of precedent conditions; but it was not the necessary effect. He fell into it, because it was easy, and offered itself to his hurry and his careless hand, as a ready means of satisfying a public ignorant of truth and indifferent to beauty. Artifice can hide the lack of art, melodrama can conceal the absence of drama; and the time for which Scott wrote really preferred artifice and melodrama. In an admirable essay on the romances of Charles Brockden Brown, the first American novelist to give us standing in the world of fiction. Colonel T. W. Higginson justly notes in defense of Brown's turgidity that " the general style of the period . . . was itself melodramatic. . . . One has only to read over the private letters of any educated family of that period to see that people did not then express themselves as they now do; that they were far more ornate in utterance, more involved in statement, more impassioned in speech." All this is very true, but it is also true that, in spite of the common tendency, there was a strong, lucid undercurrent back to nature in the writings of authors whose excellence Scott himself generously recognized. He praised these as his superiors, and it is hard in the face of his fine modesty to blame him for not emulating their sanity and verity. But he must be blamed for doing what he knew better than to do; and the student of his work will always be to blame if he fails to declare that with all his moral virtues Scott in fiction was of a low aesthetic ideal. He consciously preferred, with his great poetic soul, the folly and the falsity of the romantic to the beauty of the natural, and he wittingly, however unwillingly, extended the realm of Anne Radcliffe rather than the realm of Jane Austen. It was easier to do this, far easier; for the true, the only beautiful, is exigent of patience and of pains that Scott would not or could not give. Whether he could not or would not, he made it harder for his contemporaries and successors to be of a higher ideal than that by which he won his immense success. I believe the badness of Scott's prose in fiction is owing to the lowness of
