Books and Bookmen | Page 9

again there is no comparison, for the
grandson of Cromwell's trooper was a very wearisome, pedantic,

grey-coloured Puritan in whom one cannot affect the slightest interest.
How poorly he compares with Henry Esmond, who was slow and
diffident, but a very brave, chivalrous, single- hearted, modest
gentleman, such as Thackeray loved to describe. Were it not heresy to
our Lady Castlewood, whom all must love and serve, it also comes to
one that Henry and Beatrix would have made a complete pair if she had
put some assurance in him and he had installed some principle into her,
and Henry Esmond might have married his young kinswoman had he
been more masterful and self- confident. Thackeray takes us to a larger
and gayer scene than Scott's Edinburgh of narrow streets and gloomy
jails and working people and old-world theology, but yet it may be
after all Scott is stronger. No bit of history, for instance, in Esmond
takes such a grip of the imagination as the story of the Porteous mob.
After a single reading one carries that night scene etched for ever in his
memory. The sullen, ruthless crowd of dour Scots, the grey rugged
houses lit up by the glare of the torches, the irresistible storming of the
Tolbooth, the abject helplessness of Porteous in the hands of his
enemies, the austere and judicial self-restraint of the people, who did
their work as those who were serving justice, their care to provide a
minister for the criminal's last devotions, and their quiet dispersal after
the execution--all this remains unto to-day the most powerful
description of lynch law in fiction. The very strength of old Edinburgh
and of the Scots-folk is in the Heart of Midlothian. The rivalry,
however, between these two books must be decided by the heroine, and
it seems dangerous to the lover of Scott to let Thackeray's fine lady
stand side by side with our plain peasant girl, yet soul for soul which
was greater, Rachel of Castlewood or Jeanie Deans? Lady Castlewood
must be taken at the chief moment in Esmond, when she says to
Esmond: "To-day, Henry, in the anthem when they sang, 'When the
Lord turned the captivity of Zion we were like them that dream'--I
thought, yes, like them that dream, and then it went, 'They that sow in
tears shall reap in joy; and he that goeth forth and weepeth, shall
doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him.' I
looked up from the book and saw you; I was not surprised when I saw
you, I knew you would come, my dear, and I saw the gold sunshine
round your head."
That she said as she laughed and sobbed, crying out wildly, "Bringing

your sheaves with you, your sheaves with you." And this again, as
Esmond thinks of her, is surely beaten gold. "Gracious God, who was
he, weak and friendless creature, that such a love should be poured out
upon him; not in vain, not in vain has he lived that such a treasure be
given him? What is ambition compared to that but selfish vanity? To be
rich, to be famous: what do these profit a year hence when other names
sound louder than yours, when you lie hidden away under the ground
along with the idle titles engraven on your coffin? Only true love lives
after you, follows your memory with secret blessing or precedes you
and intercedes for you. 'Non omnis moriar'- -if dying I yet live in a
tender heart or two, nor am lost and hopeless living, if a sainted
departed soul still loves and prays for me." This seems to me the
second finest passage in English fiction, and the finest is when Jeanie
Deans went to London and pleaded with the Queen for the life of her
condemned sister, for is there any plea in all literature so eloquent in
pathos and so true to human nature as this, when the Scottish peasant
girl poured forth her heart: "When the hour of trouble comes to the
mind or to the body--and seldom may it visit your ladyship--and when
the hour of death that comes to high and low--lang and late may it be
yours--oh, my lady, then it is na' what we hae dune for oursels but what
we hae dune for ithers that we think on maist pleasantly. And the
thought that ye hae intervened to spare the puir thing's life will be
sweeter in that hour, come when it may, than if a word of your mouth
could hang the haill Porteous mob at the tail of ae tow." Jeanie Deans is
the strongest woman in the gallery of Scott, and an embodiment of all
that is sober, and strong, and conscientious, and passionate in Scotch
nature.
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