THE FEMALE PORTRAIT GALLERY.
WAVERLEY.
No.1.—FLORA MAC IVOR.
The time immediately preceding that of Sir Walter Scott may be likened to the thirty years' drought in Cyprus, during which, as an old historian says, the earth had neither green nor bloom, and the heavens seemed made of brass. The brilliant age of Pope, the wittiest in our language, had left only a cold reflection—poetry was no more, and with it had perished the animating influence it exercises over prose. The fictions put forth were of the lowest order. A castle, a ghost, an improbable villain, an impossible hero, a heroine and a harp, were the joint-stock of romances; while novels of manners were, if they could be so, still less like real life. Nothing could be more insipid than the rakes reformed in the third volume, unless it were the ladies, all loveliness and ill-luck. Inventions lacked the vivifying principle—truth; and the inevitable consequence was, the copied and the common-place. "Waverley" was the avater of a new era; and established, as it now is, among our English classics, justice cannot be done to its merits without reference to its contemporaries—"the dwindled race of little men"—the hewers of wood, and the drawers of water, where their great forefathers had planted the forest, and sank the "pure well of English undefiled."
"Waverley" was at once a novel of character, like those of Fielding and Richardson; and one of adventure, like those of Defoe; but it had that peculiar stamp of its own which genius alone can give. Founded, like the old ballads, on tradition, it entered the province of poetry, while the time in which it was written gave enlightenment, and the writer's mind its own shrewdness, sharpened by that dry humour which is essentially of Scottish growth. Scott is the founder of a new school—the picturesque, which now, more or less, influences all our writers. "Waverley" was a succession of pictures—both landscape and portrait—indeed all his characters give the idea of portraits rather than of inventions.
Flora Mac Ivor belongs to poetry—poetry which takes the highest order of qualities, to fashion into beauty, and quicken into life. It was the first attempt to give the ideal to female character in prose, if we except the "Clementina" and "Clarissa" of Richardson. But, despite of his great merits, Richardson had one fault, fatal to the lasting popularity of an author—he was too conventional. The excellent and the beautiful had no wide grasp—to-day was too much with him; he dwelt on "nice observances," and made goodness so dependent on forms and ceremonies, that the spirit was lost while attending to the shape; yet some of his conceptions are singularly fine. I know nothing in all our old drama so fertile in striking situations, so utterly desolate, as Clarissa in her wretched lodging, seated calmly at work on her shroud. She is young, but the grave yawns at her feet; she is beautiful, but the pride of loveliness is gone by for ever: delicately nurtured, she lacks the common necessaries of life, and made to be cherished and beloved, she is deserted by relative and friend. It was a great moral truth that made Richardson feel that it was impossible for such a story to end happily—it would have been to make evil work out its own reward. Clarissa could not marry Lovelace: to marry him had been to swear love and respect; the pure and noble nature must have been perverted before she could have felt either: all Clarissa could do was to forgive, and that only on her death-bed, and in the presence of her God.
But Scott possessed what Richardson lacked, the general, and the picturesque. "Flora Mac Ivor" has those qualities which we all like to believe belong to human nature; the ideal is but the realization, in a palpable form, of our noblest emotions, of our highest aspirations. Generous and high-spirited as she is, Flora never goes beyond what we wish, and what we feel, a woman might be. Generally speaking, the female character is developed through the medium of affection—till she loves, she has rarely felt, consequently rarely thought much—for thoughts are but the representatives of past feelings—it is the heart that awakens the mind in woman. But Flora Mac Ivor is among the exceptions to this rule. I believe that the imaginative, and the highly-gifted, are the least susceptible; when they do love, it is with the depth and the energy to which themselves give strength; but the imagination rarely at first seeks an object where it must depend; it likes to feel its freedom, and its earliest pursuit is usually unselfish and abstract.
Flora's imagination has an object in its loyalty—and her affection in her brother. If there be one tie on earth, dear even as love, it is that which unites an only brother and sister, left together orphans in their childhood. If "heaven lies around us in our infancy," there is something sacred in the love—an instinct with that earliest time. It grows with our growth, and strengthens with our strength; it has the confidence of marriage without its care; and, cemented by those mutual associations, whose want is so often and so severely felt in married life, it has the tenderness with none of the jealous anxiety of love. The very faults of Fergus, perhaps, did but draw the tie closer between himself and his sister. It is pleasant to excuse, when hope brings the promises of the future to palliate the errors of the past. We can imagine the youthful Highlanders returning to a country, dearer for absence; and under actual disappointment, looking forward as only youth can look. In after life the heart sinks back upon itself—we have not courage to hope.
Nothing, to use the word so peculiarly his own, can be more picturesque than the first introduction of Fergus and his sister; and while the chieftain's animation in his cause carries us along, we cannot but feel that it is Flora who infuses into their loyalty its nobler elements. It is to the credit of our nature that the generous impulse, the unselfish devotion, are never without their influence; but it is a fearful thing to influence others; every thought we have suggested, every action we have stimulated, rise, if their issue be unsuccessful, in terrible array against us. Our own fate we might have borne, but regret becomes remorse when we have urged on that of another. Clarissa might sew the garment of death calmly—it was for herself; but Flora sits sewing the shroud of her brother—the young, the gifted, the high-spirited Fergus, the last of their ancient line—the prematurely doomed chief of Glennaquoich. I never could read without tears his sister's bitter self-reproaches, that she had been the one to urge him on, and—to the scaffold! It is the cry of the heart-broken, when she so passionately exclaims, "Oh! that I could but remember to have said to him, he that strikes by the sword, shall die by the sword." It is a relief to think of Flora in the silence and the solitude of the cloister. The gates of life are as much closed upon her as if she had passed through those of death. The cause lost on which she had perilled what was dearer than existence, and the house of Stuart again in hopeless exile; her beloved brother in his early and ignominious grave—what remained for Flora but to ask her own tomb from that Heaven, the only light through the black veil of the order of St. Dominick.