Daily Capital Journal

Women in Waverley Novels.

"Ivanhoe, like an honorable gentleman, curbs his passion for Rebecca and is true to Rowena, though we see that the memory of Rebecca ever leaves his heart. Ivanhoe behaves as, in his circumstances, Scott would have behaved, in place of giving way to passion. Novels of the most poignant interest are constantly beginning in private life, and then break off, because the living characters are persons of honor and self control. Ivanhoe would have been more to the taste of today if the hero had eloped with the fair Hebrew but, the Ivanhoe and Rowena are persons of honor and self control. I found in Scott's papers letter from an enthusiastic schoolboy, stranger- 'O, Sir Walter, how could you kill the gallant cavalier and give the lady to the crop-eared Whig!' This was the remark of the natural man, Scott kept the natural man in subjection. Mr. Lang speaks roundly as to what the Waverley novels are not. For instance: "They are not the work of passionate, squalid or totally uneducated genius. They are not the work of any Peeping Tom who studies women in their dressing room and tries to spy or smell out the secrets of the eternally female. We have novels today- Novels by males full of clever lingo and depictions of womankind, which Scott would have thrown into the fire. 'I think,' writes Mr. Hutton, 'that the deficiency of his pictures of women should be grossly attributed to his natural chivalry. He hardly ventured, as it were, in his tenderness for them, to look deeply into their little weaknesses and intricacies of character.' This opinion is shared by Mr. Lang, as the following quotation will show. "As Moliere never drew jealous woman, among all his pictures of men who know, like himself, the torments of jealousy, Scott never had the heart to draw young and beautiful woman who is wicked. This ancient familiar source poignant interest he passes by out of great chivalry. There was nothing to prevent him from writing romance on the passionate, wretched tale of the once beautiful Ulrica, in 'Ivanhoe,' fair traitress driven on the winds of revenge, treachery, patricide and to incest. Here a theme for realistic novel of England after the Conquest, but Scott sketches it lightly, Thyestean horror in the background. In his work such a piece of 'realism' standing alone, like the story of Phoenix in Homer's work (In the ninth book of the Iliad), had a sense of reverence of the human things; they did not lack the imagination necessary for the portrayal of the evil and terrible, but they did not seek success in that popular region. Scott was no prude, but he held the young in reverence, knowing that among them he must have many readers. "I am unable to think the worse of him because he imposed upon himself limitations which Byron triumphantly broke through, though Scott's limitations now militate against high appreciation of his work by the admirers of Guy de Maupassant and Catulle Mendes. —Andrew Lang In his Life of Sir Walter Scott.