He could no more have
analysed such a woman, as Thackeray analyzed Lady Castlewood, or
Amelia, or Becky, or as George Eliot analysed Rosamond Vincy, than he
could have vivisected Camp or Maida. To some extent, therefore,
Scott's pictures of women remain something in the style of the
miniatures of the last age--bright and beautiful beings without any
special character in them. He was dazzled by a fair heroine. He could
not take them up into his imagination as real beings as he did men.
But then how living are his men, whether coarse or noble! What a
picture, for instance, is that in _A Legend of Montrose_ of the
conceited, pragmatic, but prompt and dauntless soldier of fortune,
rejecting Argyle's attempts to tamper with him, in the dungeon at
Inverary, suddenly throwing himself on the disguised Duke so soon as
he detects him by his voice, and wresting from him the means of his
own liberation! Who could read that scene and say for a moment that
Dalgetty is painted "from the skin inwards"? It was just Scott himself
breathing his own life through the habits of a good specimen of the
mercenary soldier--realizing where the spirit of hire would end, and
the sense of honour would begin--and preferring, even in a dungeon,
the audacious policy of a sudden attack to that of crafty negotiation.
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