350 THE SCOTT CENTENARY. 



wife. Eeligious zealots are very apt to take this metliod of enlisting inaagin- 

 ation, as they think, on the side of truth. I remember a high Anglican novel in 

 which the Papist was eaten alive by rats, and the Rationalist and Republican 

 were slowly scathed in molten lead, the fate of each being, of course, a just judg- 

 ment of heaven on those who presumed to differ from the author. Thus the 

 voice of morality is confounded with that of tyrannical petulance and self-love. 

 Not only is Scott not personal, but we cannot conceive his being so. We cannot 

 think it possible that he should degrade his art by the indulgence of egotism, or 

 crotchets, or petty piques. Least of all can we think it possible that his high 

 and gallant nature should use art as a cover for striking a foul blow. 



The Lamp of Purity. — I heard Thackeray thank Heaven for the purity of 

 Dickens. I thanked Heaven for the purity of a greater than Dickens, Thackeray 

 himself. We may all thank Heaven for the purity of one still greater than either, 

 Sir Walter Scott. I say still greater morally, as well as in power as an artist, 

 because in Thackeray there is cynicism, and cynicism, which is not good in the 

 great writer, becomes very bad in the little reader. We know what most of the 

 novels were before Scott. We know the impurity half-redeemed of Fielding, the 

 ■unredeemed impurity of Smollett, the lecherous leer of Sterne, the coarseness 

 even of Defoe. Parts of Richardson himself could not be read by a woman 

 without a blush. As to French novels, Carlyle says of one of the most famous 

 of the last century that after reading it you ought to wash seven times in 

 Jordan ; but after reading the French novels of the present day, in which lewd- 

 ness is sprinkled with sentimental rosewater, and deodorized but by no means 

 disinfected, your washings had better be seventy times seven. There is no justi- 

 fication for this ; it is mere pandering, under whatever pretences to evil propen- 

 sities ; it makes the divine art of Fiction procuress to the Lords of Hell. If our 

 established morality is in any way narrow and unjust, appeal to Philosophy, not 

 to Comus ; and remember that the mass of readers are not philosophers. Cole- 

 ridge pledges himself to find the deepest sermons under the filth of Rabelais ; 

 but Coleridge alone finds the sermons while everybody finds the filth. Impure 

 novels have brought and are bringing much misery on the world. Scott's purity 

 is not that of cloistered innocence and inexperience. It is the manly purity of 

 one who had seen the world, mingled with men of the world, known evil as well 

 as good ; but who being a true gentleman abhorred filth, and teaches us to 

 abhor it too. 



The Lamp of Humanity. — One day I see our walls placarded with the 

 advertising woodcut of a sensation novel, representing a girl tied to a 

 table and a man cutting off her feet into a tub. Another day we are allured by 

 a picture of a woman sitting at a sewing-machine and a man seizing her behind 

 by the hair, and lifting a club to knock her brains out. A French novelist 

 stimulates your jaded palate by introducing a duel fought with butchers' knives 

 by the light of lanterns. One genius subsists by murder, as another does by 

 bigamy and adultery. Scott would have recoiled from the blood as well as from 

 the ordure ; he would have allowed neither to defile his noble page. He knew 

 that there was no pretence for bringing before a reader what is merely horrible ; 



