The Dial (Third Series)/Volume 75/Walter Scott
WALTER SCOTT
NO one, writing early in the past century of the then contemporary history of European letters, would have hesitated to classify Walter Scott among the stars of first magnitude in the firmament of art and poetry. In the applause then accorded Scott's name there were few dissenting voices indeed. His works were travelling from land to land, everywhere inspiring followers and imitators—rarely, in fact, has a writer ever had pupils at once so numerous and so distinguished. It is not a question either of a "popular" vogue resting on the enthusiasm of unthinking multitudes; no less a person than Goethe spoke of Walter Scott as "a peerless genius, who fully deserves the marvellous success he is having with readers the world over." In the England of the time, it was a commonplace to compare Walter Scott with Shakespeare, the only predecessor of the great Scotchman thought worthy of mention in such connexion for fertility of inventiveness (so people said) for infinite variety of character, scene, situation, episode, for universality of human sympathy, for purity of moral tone.
Later on all this glory passed—even here in Italy; where, as compared with the dozens of translations of Scott's "complete works" issued in the first half of the Nineteenth Century, we find, after 1850, only occasional reprintings of separate volumes in series of "world classics"; while allusions to his books and his people, once so frequent in the speeches of Italian orators and in the writings of Italian authors, became more and more scanty and finally ceased. Our critics, especially after the famous strictures of Taine, showed themselves harsh, not to say cruel and contemptuous toward him—an attitude that has again been taken in Emilio Cecchi's recent History of English Literature. It is, in very truth, a tax on one's self-control to speak kindly of Scott after a conscientious reading of all his works: he wrote too many books, and the labour he imposes upon the reader of to-day—a reader quite blasé to the graces of the old art and familiar with all its tricks that once seemed so clever—fills us with a spite which betrays itself the moment we begin to talk of him. Had he stopped at Ivanhoe, Rob Roy, and one or two others at the most, the modern critic might be inclined to some indulgence. We would have patience left to weigh Scott's objective values, and in some serenity of spirit piously and gratefully acknowledge the few flashes of real art which, in spite of everything, do shine in the mass of his whole production.
This serenity we must attain if we would apply to Walter Scott even the methods of historical criticism. Approaching him from this point of view (and, as I must warn again, in a spirit of justice and serenity) we perceive that first of all we must take account of the social function he so admirably fulfilled.
Walter Scott, to speak quite plainly, was a literary manufacturer. His task it was to supply a market with wares which were in a demand as great as it was legitimate. Are not the needs of the human imagination—needs of stimulation or of amusement—real needs? And is it not a healthy manifestation of such needs to demand spectacles of virtue, of courage, of prowess, of generosity—spectacles, moreover, which will not merely satisfy idle curiosity, but prove profitable as well by imparting information about historical events, customs, epochs? Walter Scott had a genius for supplying such a market. He began by writing poems which were a first answer to the demand. After a few years he discovered that this particular brand of goods was growing stale, whether because his own raw materials were depreciating, or because a strong competition was growing up in the novelties offered by the young Lord Byron. So he turned to prose, issuing a new trade-mark that had the lure of mystery—"by the author of the Waverley novels"—and he made a great success, a success that attended him to the end. Read the "Lives" written about Walter Scott and you will see that they deal with a captain of industry and not, save incidentally, with a literary man. His biographers expatiate admiringly on the sagacity of his speculations; on the application and endurance which enabled him to produce two or three novels a year; on the estate which he created from his enormous royalties—building a castle where he entertained with princely hospitality. Of his inner life, meantime, not a word. Nothing of his experiences with love, with religion, with philosophical problems. Less than nothing about the travail of spirit which we think of as the artist's characteristic domain. In Scott's biography the dramatic moment is always 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 the historical novel, glitteringly coloured, but superficial and insignificant. Criticism, however, was eventually able to correct such exaggerations, and the benefits alone were left. No one can write a sound history of historical writing in the Nineteenth Century without giving generous credit to Walter Scott.
In the third connexion we must keep the problem of Scott distinct from the problem of art, in so far, that is, as we are interested in Scott's technical skill as a novelist. This deftness we must not measure with the ingenuity of our own day—a comparison from which it suffers badly (because Scott's methods are now quite familiar and outworn, so that a cry of "old stuff" would greet any one trying to revive them); but rather with the devices in vogue before him and with the expectations of the public to which he sold. Goethe, for example, notoriously awkward and unimaginative in plot-construction, had profound admiration for Scott as a story-teller. The "new art" he found in the great Scotchman, a "new art governed by its own inner laws," gave him "much food for thought." Scott studied his subject matter carefully as an antiquarian and a tourist. He described landscapes, based his action on manners and customs, maintained "suspense" by the use of mysterious characters endowed with extraordinary powers, created the "illusion of reality" in tales of Norman, Saxon, Puritan, and Jacobite, by making people of other times talk and act as they really talked and acted. The epic he lightened with comedy, benevolently smiling at personages limited to one idea, one desire, one motive. And unfailingly he kept his main people in the foreground, people noble and valorous, certain to hold the sympathy and interest of the reader.
In the fourth place the artistic criterion fails for Scott for the simple reason that art—or poetry, if you wish—was a secondary matter with him. The critic who looks for the artist in Scott inevitably ends with what we Italians call the "stroncatura"—the slashing, the flaying, which, however apposite it may be in the literary campaigns of our own day, becomes sheer bad manners, sheer ill-temper, when used on men of the past. Certainly when a writer like Gosse steps forward and denies anybody's right to find defects in Scott, asserting that "England can challenge the world to produce in its literature a purer spirit, a more brilliant mind, a creator of more heroic works, a more marvellous painter of historical pictures," the impulse to indulge in a bit of mirth becomes almost irresistible. But is there much really to quarrel about? Gosse himself is not quite so sure of his ground. He says that if Europe will have nothing of Walter Scott, his own England may keep him for herself, exulting in her possession of him as the author of the most perfect style in the national literature, as a writer who never wrote a word that was morbid, impertinent, mean, or low, as the most perfect exemplification of the English gentleman.
Gentleman, yes, but poet?
Scott's poetic vein, never gushing with a very copious flow, soon was clogged by his essentially prosaic temperament. Even when he was writing in verse, there was little of the poet's inspiration in him, as may be verified by recalling any one of the most famous passages of his poems. Here is what he says of the Last Minstrel:
"The way was long, the wind was cold,
The minstrel was infirm and old:
His withered cheek and tresses gray
Seemed to have known a better day;
The harp, his sole remaining joy,
Was carried by an orphan boy. . . ."
Or savour this decription of Melrose Abbey:
"If thou would'st view fair Melrose aright,
Go visit it by the pale moon-light;
For the gay beams of lightsome day
Gild, but to flout, the ruins gray.
Where the broken arches are blank in night,
And each shafted oriel glimmers white;
When the cold light's uncertain power
Streams on the ruined central tower . . .
Then go—but go alone the while,—
Then view St. David's ruined pile;
And home returning, smoothly swear,
Was never scene so sad and fair! . . ."
Quite as superficial is the art of his prose novels, replete with characters and cases known in the jargon of Latin critics as "interesting." Think of all the adventures, mysteries, duels, battles, intrigues, hairbreadth escapes, bandits, beautiful women, jolly friars, Black Knights, and what not, that constitute the thrill of Ivanhoe. But in the end we go away with empty hearts. There is neither an epic feeling, nor a religious feeling, nor even a lyric sentiment of love in this famous novel. The characters stand before us as spectacles for our eyes, or at least for our imaginations. There is no real idea behind all that happens except the idea of supplying a series of attractive scenes. Strike, if you choose, a chord of deeper resonance—the celebrated love passage between the Templar and the Jewess Rebecca. But that episode, too, is little, at bottom, but a riot in the "picturesque." The character of the enamoured knight and the exchanges between the Templar and the Jewish girl are treated in a conventional and often absurd manner: we have the set for a drama of the soul, but the soul fails to materialize. The best touches, certainly, are a few impulses of generosity in the Templar's heart, and especially his death in combat—not under the enemy's joust, but from the violent tension of his conflicting passions. There is some merit—flashes of delicate and noble brilliancy—in the portrait of Rebecca, notably in the last visit she pays to the Lady Rowena and in their farewell. It is the figure of a Jewess who remains such out of loyalty to race, but with a successful outreaching to pure humanity.
Similar moments are not lacking in other novels of Scott, Old Mortality, for instance, in the conception of the crude and licentious Sergeant Bothwell, made ridiculous by his constant harping on his descent from the Stuarts, and on whose breast, when he had fallen in battle, Morton finds a wallet containing the Stuart family tree, two love letters written in a woman's hand twenty years before, a wisp of hair, and poems indited by this same Bothwell. Morton is moved to reflection on the destiny of this singular and unhappy wretch, who, from the depth of failure and poverty, could still cherish his dream of the grandeur to which birth entitled him, and who, from his debauchery and licence, looked back with yearning toward the one pure passion of his youth. Rob Roy has a few hints at poetry—themes of travel and unexpected meetings—in its earlier chapters; so does Waverley in an occasional evocation of traditional semi-barbarous life. But they are soon lost in insignificant intrigue again. This is one's inevitable experience with Scott. His novels start promisingly—I am thinking of Saint Roman's Wells particularly—but before long we are caught in the "romanesque," the pastiche, the imbroglio, and interest ends—not altogether, to be sure, for we are certain to encounter here and there figures like that of the Curate of Saint Roman (since I have mentioned this novel) drawn with a moving and delicate kindliness that has a very real charm.
This kindly smile of Walter Scott is perhaps the most truly poetic thing about him. It illuminates even his comic characters who tend toward the "fixed type," but are sometimes kept within proper bounds. By virtue of it, The Heart of Midlothian surpasses, so it seems to me, all the other novels. This story, known on the Continent as The Prison of Edinboro, is penetrated through and through with kindliness, not in details only, but in the very composition of the plot. Even here there is intrigue galore, with the usual brigands (brigands, who are not brigands so much as gentlemen of supernal delicacy) and other make-ups from the travelling bag of the melodramatist. But how escape the spell of the gentle Effie, falsely accused of infanticide, or of her sister Jennie, who will not lie to save her, but who does save her in the end by persistence in the face of every danger? The sentimental "Laird," Dumb Dikes, the malicious and generous, the shrewd and jealous Madge, are handled in the most realistic, pitiful, truth. Scott spares David Deans none of the latter's pedantry and self-conceit; but the man's sterling nobility in the midst of bitter trial, his tenderness, his humility for all of his religious austerity, do not fail to move us. Even the good-natured Saddletree is presented in a singularly subtle blend of unselfishness and pride. I note as a matter of curiosity that the scene at supper in the fisherman’s hut where David Deans, about to say grace, pushes Effie's empty chair away from the table as though to remove every earthly association from the reading of the Scriptures, had a great fortune in Italy in the plagiarism made of it by Grossi in his Marco Visconti.
This stream of very human goodness, this undercurrent of smiling sympathy and charitableness, finds its way through the bulk of Scott's work, here and there breaking to the surface in what may be called real art, a modest, unpretentious art, to be sure, where all the rest is erudition, skill, business; but with poetry enough to let us depart in good humour from an author who delighted our fathers and grandfathers, and who, for this reason if for no other, deserves courteous treatment from their children and grandchildren.