" "Die," cries Balfour
of Burley to the villain in "Old Mortality." "Die, hoping nothing,
believing nothing--" "And fearing nothing," replies the other. This is
the old and honourable fine art of bragging, as it was practised by the
great worthies of antiquity. The man who cannot appreciate it goes along
with the man who cannot appreciate beef or claret or a game with
children or a brass band. They are afraid of making fools of themselves,
and are unaware that that transformation has already been triumphantly
effected.
Scott is separated, then, from much of the later conception of fiction
by this quality of eloquence. The whole of the best and finest work of
the modern novelist (such as the work of Mr. Henry James) is primarily
concerned with that delicate and fascinating speech which burrows deeper
and deeper like a mole; but we have wholly forgotten that speech which
mounts higher and higher like a wave and falls in a crashing peroration.
Perhaps the most thoroughly brilliant and typical man of this decade is
Mr. Bernard Shaw. In his admirable play of "Candida" it is clearly a
part of the character of the Socialist clergyman that he should be
eloquent, but he is not eloquent because the whole "G.B.S." condition of
mind renders impossible that poetic simplicity which eloquence requires.
Scott takes his heroes and villains seriously, which is, after all, the
way that heroes and villains take themselves--especially villains.
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