ways the failure of his publisher-partner, which left the novelist penniless and thousands of pounds in debt; and lo, he rises indomitable above misfortune, courageously taking pen in hand. He promises to pay that debt, to satisfy all his creditors to the last shilling. And the promise he keeps; because when in the end he collapses under the heroic effort, he has redeemed most of his obligations, leaving the rest to be provided for after his death by the gratitude of a nation. This gratitude, notice, was addressed probably less to the great writer than to the great business man who had furnished an immortal example of British probity and rectitude. The life of Walter Scott belongs not to the history of literature, but to that of "Self-help." It goes well with the books of Smiles and the like.
In the second place, Scott's work again fails to enter the province of art since its character was determined by the specific manner in which the demand of the British—of the European—consumer was presented and by the nature of the goods he aimed to supply. It was a question of the new historical-moral-political consciousness that had sprung up in reaction to the rationalism of the Eighteenth Century and to the Jacobinism of the French Revolution, a reaction that implied a new reverence toward history, stress on tradition and custom, emphasis on nationality (as opposed to superficial and unilateral cosmopolitanism). Of all this Scott was surely not the author. He had numberless predecessors in Germany, France, Great Britain, and even in Italy. But just as surely he was the great popularizer of these tendencies, and by all odds the shrewdest of those who exploited them commercially.
We must not underestimate the importance of Scott's influence in this connexion. He was a great educator. People whom the singing of the poets, the thinking of the philosophers, the learning of the historians, failed to touch, found easy access to the facile romance of Walter Scott. The Scotland of his imagination engendered a whole series of other Scotlands; the nations of Europe, I mean, going back into their own pasts, reviving their ancient customs and traditions. Even professional historians were not immune to his influence, and this influence was a good one in the sense that it forced history away from the monotonous and colourless methods of the Humanists and the "Illuminati"—its defects appearing largely in the temptation it fostered to confuse history with
