WALTER SCOTT

In the early nineteenth century Scotland supplied literature with a writer of unexcelled and marvelous creative energy, who confirmed the triumph of the Romantic Movement with work of the first importance in both verse and prose, namely Walter Scott. Scott, further, is personally one of the most delightful figures in English literature, and he is probably the most famous of all the Scotsmen who have ever lived.

In 1802-1803 he published «Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border», a collection of Scottish ballads and songs, which he carefully annotated. He went on in 1805, when he was thirty-four, to his first original verse-romance, «The Lay of the Last Minstrel». Carelessly constructed and written, this poem was nevertheless the most spirited reproduction of the life of feudal chivalry which the Romantic Movement had yet brought forth, and its popularity was immediate and enormous. Always writing with the greatest facility, though in brief hours snatched from his other occupations, Scott followed up «The Lay» during the next ten years with the much superior «Marmion», «The Lady of the Lake», and other verse-romances, most of which greatly increased both his reputation and his income.

The amount and variety of his literary work was much greater than is understood by most of his admirers today. The circumstances which led him to turn from poetry to prose fiction are well known. His poetical vein was really exhausted when in 1812 and 1813 Byron’s «Childe Harold» captured the public fancy. Just about as Scott was good-naturedly confessing to himself that it was useless to dispute Byron’s supremacy he accidentally came across the first chapters of «Waverley», which he had written some years before and had thrown aside in unwillingness to risk his fame by a venture in a new field. Taking it up with renewed interest, in the evenings of three weeks he wrote the remaining two-thirds of it; and he published it with an ultimate success even greater than that of his poetry. The rapidity of the appearance of his novels testified to the almost unlimited accumulation of traditions and incidents with which his astonishing memory was stored; in seventeen years he published nearly thirty «Waverley» novels, equipping most of them, besides, with long fictitious introductions, which the present-day reader almost universally skips.

Scott’s long poems, the best of them, are the chief examples in English of dashing verse romances of adventure and love. They are hastily done and there is no attempt at subtlety of characterization or at any moral or philosophical meaning; nevertheless the reader’s interest in the vigorous and picturesque action is maintained throughout at the highest pitch. Furthermore, they contain much finely sympathetic description of Scottish scenery, impressionistic, but poured out with enthusiasm. Scott’s numerous lyrics are similarly stirring or moving expressions of the primal emotions, and some of them are charmingly musical.

The qualities of the novels, which represent the culmination of Romantic historical fiction, are much the same. Through his bold and active historical imagination Scott vivifies the past magnificently; without doubt, the great majority of English readers know English history chiefly through his works. His dramatic power, also, at its best, is superb; in his great scenes and crises he is masterly as narrator and describer. In the presentation of the characters there is often much of the same superficiality as in the poems, but there is much also of the highest skill. The novels may be roughly divided into three classes: first those, like «Ivanhoe», whose scene is laid in the twelfth or thirteenth century; second those, like «Kenilworth», which are located in the fifteenth or sixteenth; and third, those belonging to England and Scotland of the seventeenth and eighteenth. In the earlier ones sheer romance predominates and the hero and heroine are likely to be more or less conventional paragons, respectively, of courage and tender charm; but in the later ones Scott largely portrays the life and people which he himself knew; and he knew them through and through. His Scottish characters in particular, often especially the secondary ones, are delightfully realistic portraits of a great variety of types. Descriptions of scenery are correspondingly fuller in the novels than in the poems.

In minor matters, in the novels also, there is much carelessness. The structure of the stories is far from compact. Scott often commits errors, not only, like all historical novelists, deliberately manipulating the order and details of the actual events to suit his purposes, but also making frequent sheer mistakes. In «Ivanhoe,» for example, the picture of life in the twelfth century is altogether incorrect and misleading. In all these matters scores of more self-conscious later writers are superior to Scott, but mere correctness counts for far less than genius. When all is said, Scott remains the greatest historical novelist, and one of the greatest creative forces, in world literature.

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