The Press. — London, England, 1856-04-26 00:00:00

402 A good deal is attempted to be made out of Sir Walter's denials of the authorship. But he also asserted it with equal directness Thus, even on the most moderate view, the two statements would cancel each other. But, in reality, the affirmation ought to be received with much greater confidence than the denial ; for the former was made to the public for the sake of his creditors, when to have falsified the facts would havo passed from a mere literary fiction into a business fraud. It is further urged that the rapidity with which these novels were issued from the press is destructive of the hypothesis that they were written by Scutt alone; and especially that the story of " Guy Mannering " could by no possibility have been written in a fortnight, which was all the time Scott is supposed to have bestowed upon it. But this is a ques tion which we think no man can undertake to determine ; while every man may speak of composing a work in a different sense. He may mean, of course, writing it de novo, or he may mean putting together his materials; and we know of no evidence to show that Scott meant anything more than the latter when he spoke of having written " Guy Man nering " in a fortnight. The evidence of T. Scott's brother officers in Canada is perhaps entitled to more weight : " In those days," said Colonel W—, " a regiment was one large family, and officers were really brother officers." Colonel W— used to be constantly in and out of the house, and be scarcely ever entered without finding Mrs. Scott at her desk, with a heap of MSS. before her. What was the destination of these writings he knows not. Both Mr. and Mrs. Scott abounded in anecdote. Colonel W--'s recollections state, that it was not until after Tom Scott's death at Quebec, and when there no longer existed any doubt in; the literary world concerning the supposed author of the " Waverley Novels," that he had any suspi• cion of Tom Scott and his wife having had any hand in them. He and some other officers then called to mind his having said one evening, after having drank pretty freely, addressing some of them, " Ah, you'll be astonished to find yourselves some day or other in print." Thomas Scott was a bon-vivant. I)algetty was a gay, lively fellow, but rather an indifferent soldier. Among the many com• munications from Walter Scott, which were continually arriving, were remittances of money, though not to a large amount. Colonel W—'s impression is, that neither Thomas Scott nor his wife wrote any of the novels ; but that they assisted their brother considerably in supplying anecdotes, traits of character, &c. &c. There are (me or two other points of this sort, of which all we can say is, that they are not irreconcileable with the ordinary theory ; while the new theory necessitates the adop tion of conclusions far more difficult to swal low than a belief that nothing was, after all, meant by the above passage. Nor is the pamphleteer's case any stronger when he addresses himself to the internal evidence. In the first place, he makes a sin gular blunder about Mr Adolphus : "In every warlike scene that awes and agitates, or dazzles and inspires," observed Mr. Adolphus, " the poet triumphs; but where any effect is to be produced by dwelling on the magnitude of military habits and disci pline, or exhibiting the blended hues of individual hu mour, and professional peculiarity, as they present them selves in the mess-room, or the guard-room. every advantage is on the side of the novelist. I might illustrate this by tracing all the gradations of character marked out in the novels, from the Baron of liradwardine to Tom Halliday ; but the examples are too well known to require enumeration." Mr. Adolphus went on to say that Scott " must have bestowed a greater attention on military sub jects, and have mixed nr.,re frequently in the society of soldiers. than is usual with persons not educated to the profession of arms." But had our author read the whole of the passage from which this is taken a little more attentively, he would have discovered that the conclusion drawn by Mr. Adolphus is exactly the reverse of the one he supposes. Mr. Adolphus contends that the very excess and carefulness of detail in Scott's military descrip tion is such as to denote a writer unfamiliar with such subjects, and contrasts the free and confident manner of all his legal passages. He instances the storming of the pass in "Rob Roy" as a more particular instance of this failing The argument drawn from the beauty of Scott's female characters, which it is urged no male writer could have produced, is clearly a mere begging of the question, and we there fore pass on to his final topic—the coincidence of names in the "Waverley Novels" with the names of officers who were in Canada with Thomas Scott. The author brings forward an imposing array of names, which upon examination, how ever, melts away to almost nothing. Mauy of THE PRESS. them—such as Cunningham, Grant, Mac gregor, &a et hoc genus omne—are the com monest Scotch, and require no seeking in Canada. Many are the names of real persons —such as General Harrison, Leslie, Wayland Smith ; many of them are names which occur in novels confessedly Sir Walter's own ; and many are the names of officers engaged in the Swedish service or the Scottish Archer Guard, the rolls of which Sir Walter was certain to have studied. Sir Donald Mackay, for in stance, commanded a brigade in the Danish service ; and the names of Heriot, Ramsay, &c., occur in the papers relating to the Scottish Archers There are perhaps half a dozen names which it is probable Scott may have got through his brother; but there are many ways by which it might happen, without ne cessitating the hypothesis that T. Scott wrote all the novels. But there is still left one argument more potent than all. Would Thomas and Mrs. Scott have rested content with their very moderate income while Sir Walter was making ten thousand a year by the novels ? This is to our mind so conclusive that we should scarcely have examined the pamphlet in detail had it not been that the public were considerably impressed by it. And, indeed, it is perhaps no loss of labour to have pointed out the flim siness of the arguments which have been thought sufficient by their author to impose on the reading classes of this country. The Ring and the Veil. By J. A. St. John. Three Vols. London : Chapman and Hall. As comedy has been said to answer its true object when it makes the audience laugh, so perhaps we may say that a novel in some sense answers its true end, when we can read it straight through with sus tained interest. This leading merit is possessed by Mr. St. John's book, but, we are compelled to add, few other. Most of the characters are mere daubs, and those which affect originality are not natural. The plot is stiff and clumsy, and the incidents im probable and unconnected. If it be asked how, with all these faults, the story can be interesting, the reply is not difficult. The fable, like many others of the present day, is not one, but many. It is a series of sketches such as we might read in the newspapers : now a murder—now a critn. con. case—now a forgery —varied with occasional glimpses of possible seduc tions. The hero himself, a Roman Catholic atheist, has been defrauded of his inheritance (7,0001. a year) by a revengeful priest, with whose mistress he bad eloped, and in the opening of the story is walking the streets of London in a state bordering on starva tion. He first becomes a ballad-singer, and then " a literary gentleman," in which capacity he contrives to make a competency, and is present at various literary sArees given by aristocratic patrons of letters, which assemblies, like a true Bohemian, he pronounces intolerable. Continuing his career of litereture, he becomes mixed up with a variety of such events as we have above described, in some as principal, in others only as an interested party, and finally winds up by falling desperately in love with an Italian girl who has vowed herself to the convent. Her innocence converts him from his profligacy, and his passion converts her from her religion. In this instance his intentions are " strictly honourable," and, having recovered his property exactly at the right moment, by a series of manmuvres which we do not understand, he marries Angelica, and settles with her in an obscure house in the suburbs, which love renders "more glorious than Eden itself." The hero and Angelica are the only two personages in the book which are entitled to the praise of care fully-drawn characters. But these are far from skilful. The reformation of the one is as much too abrupt as the conversion of the other; while the notion that an Italian gentleman should leave his daughter, an inexperienced girl of eighteen, in the sole charge of a man of thirty, whom he knew to be a libertine, when he himself was absent from England, is so ridicu lously improbable as to be fitted only for the Minerva Press, or the Transpontine stage. Yet the inter course between Angelica and her lover during the whole of this period is naturally full of interest, and we forget its absurdity in the solicitude with which we watch the progress of the contest between love and religion on one side, and between early habits of vice and a newly-born respect for virtue on the other. But here too the element of exaggeration prepon derates. Angelica adheres to her resolution up to the very steps of the altar, and, just as the white veil is about to be replaced by the black, is moved from her purpose by one glance at her lover's face, who is a witness of the ceremony, on which she must have seen an almost equally agonised expression on many previous occasions. This is the concentrated essence of melodrama; and we should not be surprised if " The !ling and the Veil" were dramatised for the Victoria. SATURDAY, THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE. AN article in the last Edinburgh on the text of Shakespeare, written with the object of giving " authority " to the MS. corrections of Mr. Collier's Folio of 1632, calls for more critical attention than we can usually bestow on review papers. This article sets out with asserting that a wide distinction must be made between mere "conjectural emenda tion," which the reviewer treats very contempt uous l y, and emendation proceeding from authority of what• ever kind it may be. The purpose of making this distinction, in the first instance, is to discredit all that has been done by the editors of Shakespeare down to this present year, from Rowe to Singer, who had no better guide to purge the text from manifold and gross errors than acute critical ability, fine feeling for the poet, a comparison of probabilities, and attentive study of the literature and social atmo sphere of Shakespeare's time; and to magnify the mass of corrections which appear on the margin of the " beer-soiled," "tobacco-stained," and "candle snuffed" folio discovered by Mr. Collier. To the authority of this volume, which the reviewer tells us " seems to have undergone the discipline of some "servants'-hall," the criticism of Rowe, Theobald, Pope, Hanmer, Warburton, Johnson, Malone. Steevens, and a host of others in more modern day, is to give place. They had no authority for their corrections, but the MS. corrector had authority for his. "Whatever is not conjectural " says the Edinburgh reviewer, authentic." On that rock he takes his stand, and would build his text. if the MS. corrector did not proceed purely from conjecture in the alters. tions he made, he mils:, have proceeded from authority ; and if we admit one correction to be made on authority, then there is a presumption that all must have been made on authority. The reviewer labours to show that some corrections are of a kind which cannot be imagined to be purely conjectural, and having obtained as he fancies by these instances a pivot for his lever, he proceeds to shake the whole text : If in part only authentic—if we once establish that the corrector has even partial authority—every one of his readings, whether we like it or not, has a certain amount of a priori evidence in its favour, and no mere conjecture ought to be admitted to stand against such presumption. But this critic, who is of a class of mind that loves to build inverted pyramids, that thinks this sort of logic can raise a St. Peter's on a needle's point, forgets that he ought first to define what he means by authority and authentic, as opposed to conjecture. This question is a very subtle one, and as difficult to determine as the difference between direct and circumstantial evidence. Under certain conditions the latter may be surer than the former, and in some cases conjec tural emendation may be a safer guide than correc tions in an old handwriting found in a " beer-stained" folio. The folio of 1632 was published sixteen years after Shakespeare's death, and the copy of which Mr. Collier by the "merest accident" became the possessor contains, says that gentleman, " notes and "emendations in a handwriting not much later than " when it came from the press." Now the " autho rity" for such corrections might proceed from many various kinds of sources, and might be of all kinds of value, from the MSS. of Shakespeare himself, down to the gossip of actors, or the often-copied "parts" given to the players to learn. "Whatever "is not conjectural is authentic !" Did ever critic lay down a canon more essentially absurd? We know that actors in our own time were accustomed to stretch a line across the stage on which the gar ments of Prospero were hung. A person might accept that traditional interpretation of the text. It would not be conjectural, but would it be authentic? The reviewer is so shortsighted, so confined in his scan of probabilities, that he supposes we must choose between accepting the notes of the corrector as purely conjectural, or as derived (in part at least) from an examination of the very :rIS. text of Shake speare. It is to the latter conclusion that he would lead us : On the whole, we are strongly attracted towards an hypothesis which we have already indicated : that the cor- rector had under his eyes large portions of the authentic text of Shakespeare, in what shape it is impossible to say : that he transcribed from his mysterious original in the molt painstaking manner, and with general accuracy, but still with occasional slips, deviations, and misconceptions• For this hypothesis there is no shad )w of founda tion, and that it should have been put forth at all is disgraceful to the criticism of our day. It is to be decisively refuted by an examination of the correc tor's work. Let us say before proceeding further that we are willing to assume that the corrections are genuine, — that is, that they belong to a period not far removed from that of the date of the folio. But surely those who are sceptical on the point have grounds for their scepticism. Are literary forgeries, not less elaborate, unknown? Can we forget Chatterton and Ireland? Have we not recently had a new Waverley novel from France ? Is is not possible that Mr. Collier may have been imposed on? I