Through the Magic Door | Page 8

have seen many of those iron men who
during the preceding twenty years had been the scourge and also the
redemption of Europe. To us the soldiers who scowled at him from the
sidewalks in 1814 would have been as interesting and as much
romantic figures of the past as the mail-clad knights or ruffling
cavaliers of his novels. A picture from the life of a Peninsular veteran,
with his views upon the Duke, would be as striking as Dugald Dalgetty
from the German wars. But then no man ever does realize the true
interest of the age in which he happens to live. All sense of proportion
is lost, and the little thing hard-by obscures the great thing at a distance.
It is easy in the dark to confuse the fire-fly and the star. Fancy, for
example, the Old Masters seeking their subjects in inn parlours, or St.
Sebastians, while Columbus was discovering America before their very
faces.
I have said that I think "Ivanhoe" the best of Scott's novels. I suppose
most people would subscribe to that. But how about the second best? It
speaks well for their general average that there is hardly one among
them which might not find some admirers who would vote it to a place
of honour. To the Scottish-born man those novels which deal with
Scottish life and character have a quality of raciness which gives them
a place apart. There is a rich humour of the soil in such books as "Old
Mortality," "The Antiquary," and "Rob Roy," which puts them in a
different class from the others. His old Scottish women are, next to his
soldiers, the best series of types that he has drawn. At the same time it
must be admitted that merit which is associated with dialect has such
limitations that it can never take the same place as work which makes
an equal appeal to all the world. On the whole, perhaps, "Quentin

Durward," on account of its wider interests, its strong
character-drawing, and the European importance of the events and
people described, would have my vote for the second place. It is the
father of all those sword-and-cape novels which have formed so
numerous an addition to the light literature of the last century. The
pictures of Charles the Bold and of the unspeakable Louis are
extraordinarily vivid. I can see those two deadly enemies watching the
hounds chasing the herald, and clinging to each other in the convulsion
of their cruel mirth, more clearly than most things which my eyes have
actually rested upon.
The portrait of Louis with his astuteness, his cruelty, his superstition
and his cowardice is followed closely from Comines, and is the more
effective when set up against his bluff and war-like rival. It is not often
that historical characters work out in their actual physique exactly as
one would picture them to be, but in the High Church of Innsbruck I
have seen effigies of Louis and Charles which might have walked from
the very pages of Scott-Louis, thin, ascetic, varminty; and Charles with
the head of a prize-fighter. It is hard on us when a portrait upsets all our
preconceived ideas, when, for example, we see in the National Portrait
Gallery a man with a noble, olive-tinted, poetic face, and with a start
read beneath it that it is the wicked Judge Jeffreys. Occasionally,
however, as at Innsbruck, we are absolutely satisfied. I have before me
on the mantelpiece yonder a portrait of a painting which represents
Queen Mary's Bothwell. Take it down and look at it. Mark the big head,
fit to conceive large schemes; the strong animal face, made to captivate
a sensitive, feminine woman; the brutally forceful features--the mouth
with a suggestion of wild boars' tusks behind it, the beard which could
bristle with fury: the whole man and his life-history are revealed in that
picture. I wonder if Scott had ever seen the original which hangs at the
Hepburn family seat?
Personally, I have always had a very high opinion of a novel which the
critics have used somewhat harshly, and which came almost the last
from his tired pen. I mean "Count Robert of Paris." I am convinced that
if it had been the first, instead of the last, of the series it would have
attracted as much attention as "Waverley." I can understand the state of
mind of the expert, who cried out in mingled admiration and despair: "I
have studied the conditions of Byzantine Society all my life, and here

comes a Scotch lawyer who makes the whole thing clear to me in a
flash!" Many men could draw with more or less success Norman
England, or mediaeval France, but to reconstruct a whole dead
civilization in so plausible a way, with such