" Mr. Morritt, writing to Scott in March, 1815, hopes
he will "restore pure narrative to the dignity from which it gradually
slipped before it dwindled into a manufactory for the circulating
library." "Waverley," he asserted, "would prevail over people otherwise
averse to blue-backed volumes." Thus it was an unconsidered art which
Scott took up and revived. Half a century had passed since Fielding gave
us in "Tom Jones" his own and very different picture of life in the
"'forty-five,"--of life with all the romance of the "Race to Derby" cut
down to a sentence or two. Since the age of the great English novelists,
Richardson and Fielding and Miss Burney, the art of fiction had been
spasmodically alive in the hands of Mrs. Radcliffe, had been sentimental
with Henry Mackenzie, and now was all but moribund, save for the humorous
Irish sketches of Miss Edgeworth. As Scott always insisted, it was mainly
"the extended and well-merited fame of Miss Edgeworth" which induced him
to try his hand on a novel containing pictures of Scottish life and
character. Nothing was more remarkable in his own novels than the
blending of close and humorous observation of common life with pleasure
in adventurous narratives about "what is not so, and was not so, and
Heaven forbid that it ever should be so," as the girl says in the nursery
tale.
Pages:
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112