Through the Magic Door | Page 6

even understand them. But at last I realized what a
treasure they were. In my boyhood I read them by surreptitious
candle-ends in the dead of the night, when the sense of crime added a
new zest to the story. Perhaps you have observed that my "Ivanhoe" is
of a different edition from the others. The first copy was left in the
grass by the side of a stream, fell into the water, and was eventually
picked up three days later, swollen and decomposed, upon a mud-bank.
I think I may say, however, that I had worn it out before I lost it. Indeed,
it was perhaps as well that it was some years before it was replaced, for

my instinct was always to read it again instead of breaking fresh
ground.
I remember the late James Payn telling the anecdote that he and two
literary friends agreed to write down what scene in fiction they thought
the most dramatic, and that on examining the papers it was found that
all three had chosen the same. It was the moment when the unknown
knight, at Ashby-de-la-Zouch, riding past the pavilions of the lesser
men, strikes with the sharp end of his lance, in a challenge to mortal
combat, the shield of the formidable Templar. It was, indeed, a
splendid moment! What matter that no Templar was allowed by the
rules of his Order to take part in so secular and frivolous an affair as a
tournament? It is the privilege of great masters to make things so, and it
is a churlish thing to gainsay it. Was it not Wendell Holmes who
described the prosaic man, who enters a drawing-room with a couple of
facts, like ill-conditioned bull-dogs at his heels, ready to let them loose
on any play of fancy? The great writer can never go wrong. If
Shakespeare gives a sea-coast to Bohemia, or if Victor Hugo calls an
English prize-fighter Mr. Jim-John-Jack--well, it was so, and that's an
end of it. "There is no second line of rails at that point," said an editor
to a minor author. "I make a second line," said the author; and he was
within his rights, if he can carry his readers' conviction with him.
But this is a digression from "Ivanhoe." What a book it is! The second
greatest historical novel in our language, I think. Every successive
reading has deepened my admiration for it. Scott's soldiers are always
as good as his women (with exceptions) are weak; but here, while the
soldiers are at their very best, the romantic figure of Rebecca redeems
the female side of the story from the usual commonplace routine. Scott
drew manly men because he was a manly man himself, and found the
task a sympathetic one.
He drew young heroines because a convention demanded it, which he
had never the hardihood to break. It is only when we get him for a
dozen chapters on end with a minimum of petticoat--in the long stretch,
for example, from the beginning of the Tournament to the end of the
Friar Tuck incident--that we realize the height of continued romantic
narrative to which he could attain. I don't think in the whole range of
our literature we have a finer sustained flight than that.
There is, I admit, an intolerable amount of redundant verbiage in Scott's

novels. Those endless and unnecessary introductions make the shell
very thick before you come to the oyster. They are often admirable in
themselves, learned, witty, picturesque, but with no relation or
proportion to the story which they are supposed to introduce. Like so
much of our English fiction, they are very good matter in a very bad
place. Digression and want of method and order are traditional national
sins. Fancy introducing an essay on how to live on nothing a year as
Thackeray did in "Vanity Fair," or sandwiching in a ghost story as
Dickens has dared to do. As well might a dramatic author rush up to the
footlights and begin telling anecdotes while his play was suspending its
action and his characters waiting wearily behind him. It is all wrong,
though every great name can be quoted in support of it. Our sense of
form is lamentably lacking, and Sir Walter sinned with the rest. But get
past all that to a crisis in the real story, and who finds the terse phrase,
the short fire-word, so surely as he? Do you remember when the
reckless Sergeant of Dragoons stands at last before the grim Puritan,
upon whose head a price has been set: "A thousand marks or a bed of
heather!" says he, as he draws. The Puritan draws also: "The Sword of
the Lord and of Gideon!" says he. No verbiage there! But the very spirit
of either