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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Sir Walter Scott, by William Paton Ker
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Sir Walter Scott
+       A Lecture at the Sorbonne
+
+Author: William Paton Ker
+
+Release Date: April 29, 2007 [EBook #21250]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SIR WALTER SCOTT ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Constanze Hofmann, Jeanette Jordan, Lori
+Scoggins, Norilan, McMartha, sassi, Siobhan Hillman, Tamise
+Totterdell, Zara Baxter, Janet Blenkinship and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
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+
+
+  SIR WALTER SCOTT
+
+  A Lecture at the Sorbonne,
+  May 22, 1919, in the series of
+  _Conferences Louis Liard_
+
+  BY
+
+  WILLIAM PATON KER, LL.D.
+
+  GLASGOW
+
+  MACLEHOSE, JACKSON AND CO.
+
+  PUBLISHERS TO THE UNIVERSITY
+
+  1919
+
+
+
+
+NOTE
+
+
+This Essay appeared in the _Anglo-French Review_, August, 1919, and
+I am obliged to the Editor and Publisher for leave to reprint it.
+
+                                           W. P. K.
+
+
+
+
+Sir Walter Scott
+
+
+When I was asked to choose a subject for a lecture at the Sorbonne,
+there came into my mind somehow or other the incident of Scott's visit
+to Paris when he went to see _Ivanhoe_ at the Odeon, and was amused to
+think how the story had travelled and made its fortune:--
+
+     'It was an opera, and, of course, the story sadly mangled and
+     the dialogue in great part nonsense. Yet it was strange to
+     hear anything like the words which (then in an agony of pain
+     with spasms in my stomach) I dictated to William Laidlaw at
+     Abbotsford, now recited in a foreign tongue, and for the
+     amusement of a strange people. I little thought to have
+     survived the completing of this novel.'
+
+It seemed to me that here I had a text for my sermon. The cruel
+circumstances of the composition of _Ivanhoe_ might be neglected. The
+interesting point was in the contrast between the original home of
+Scott's imagination and the widespread triumph of his works abroad--on
+the one hand, Edinburgh and Ashestiel, the traditions of the Scottish
+border and the Highlands, the humours of Edinburgh lawyers and Glasgow
+citizens, country lairds, farmers and ploughmen, the Presbyterian
+eloquence of the Covenanters and their descendants, the dialect hardly
+intelligible out of its own region, and not always clear even to natives
+of Scotland; on the other hand, the competition for Scott's novels in
+all the markets of Europe, as to which I take leave to quote the
+evidence of Stendhal:--
+
+     'Lord Byron, auteur de quelques heroides sublimes, mais
+     toujours les memes, et de beaucoup de tragedies mortellement
+     ennuyeuses, n'est point du tout le chef des romantiques.
+
+     'S'il se trouvait un homme que les traducteurs a la toise se
+     disputassent egalement a Madrid, a Stuttgard, a Paris et a
+     Vienne, l'on pourrait avancer que cet homme a devine les
+     tendances morales de son epoque.'
+
+If Stendhal proceeds to remark in a footnote that 'l'homme lui-meme est
+peu digne d'enthousiasme,' it is pleasant to remember that Lord Byron
+wrote to M. Henri Beyle to correct his low opinion of the character of
+Scott. This is by the way, though not, I hope, an irrelevant remark. For
+Scott is best revealed in his friendships; and the mutual regard of
+Scott and Byron is as pleasant to think of as the friendship between
+Scott and Wordsworth.
+
+As to the truth of Stendhal's opinion about the vogue of Scott's novels
+and his place as chief of the romantics, there is no end to the list of
+witnesses who might be summoned. Perhaps it may be enough to remember
+how the young Balzac was carried away by the novels as they came fresh
+from the translator, almost immediately after their first appearance at
+home.
+
+One distinguishes easily enough, at home in Scotland, between the
+novels, or the passages in the novels, that are idiomatic, native,
+homegrown, intended for his own people, and the novels not so limited,
+the romances of English or foreign history--_Ivanhoe_, _Kenilworth_,
+_Quentin Durward_. But as a matter of fact these latter, though possibly
+easier to understand and better suited to the general public, were not
+invariably preferred. The novels were 'the Scotch novels.' Although
+Thackeray, when he praises Scott, takes most of his examples from the
+less characteristic, what we may call the English group, on the other
+hand, Hazlitt dwells most willingly on the Scotch novels, though he did
+not like Scotsmen, and shared some of the prejudice of Stendhal--'my
+friend Mr. Beyle,' as he calls him in one place--with regard to Scott
+himself. And Balzac has no invidious preferences: he recommends an
+English romance, _Kenilworth_, to his sister, and he also remembers
+David Deans, a person most intensely and peculiarly Scots.
+
+One may distinguish the Scotch novels, which only their author could
+have written, from novels like _Peveril of the Peak_ or _Anne of
+Geierstein_, which may be thought to resemble rather too closely the
+imitations of Scott, the ordinary historical novel as it was written by
+Scott's successors. But though the formula of the conventional
+historical novel may have been drawn from the less idiomatic group, it
+was not this that chiefly made Scott's reputation. His fame and
+influence were achieved through the whole mass of his immense and varied
+work; and the Scots dialect and humours, which make so large a part of
+his resources when he is putting out all his power, though they have
+their difficulties for readers outside of Scotland, were no real
+hindrances in the way of the Scotch novels: Dandie Dinmont and Bailie
+Nicol Jarvie, Cuddie Headrigg and Andrew Fairservice were not ignored or
+forgotten, even where _Ivanhoe_ or _The Talisman_ might have the
+preference as being more conformable to the general mind of novel
+readers.
+
+The paradox remains: that the most successful novelist of the whole
+world should have had his home and found his strength in a country with
+a language of its own, barely intelligible, frequently repulsive to its
+nearest neighbours, a language none the more likely to win favour when
+the manners or ideas of the country were taken into consideration as
+well.
+
+The critics who refuse to see much good in Scott, for the most part
+ignore the foundations of his work. Thus Stendhal, who acknowledges
+Scott's position as representative of his age, the one really great,
+universally popular, author of his day, does not recognise in Scott's
+imagination much more than trappings and tournaments, the furniture of
+the regular historical novel. He compares Scott's novels with _La
+Princesse de Cleves_, and asks which is more to be praised, the author
+who understands and reveals the human heart, or the descriptive
+historian who can fill pages with unessential details but is afraid of
+the passions.
+
+In which it seems to be assumed that Scott, when he gave his attention
+to the background and the appropriate dresses, was neglecting the
+dramatic truth of his characters and their expression. Scott, it may be
+observed, had, in his own reflexions on the art of novel-writing, taken
+notice of different kinds of policy in dealing with the historical
+setting. In his lives of the novelists, reviewing _The Old English
+Baron_, he describes the earlier type of historical novel in which
+little or nothing is done for antiquarian decoration or for local
+colour; while in his criticism of Mrs. Radcliffe he uses the very
+term--'melodrama'--and the very distinction--melodrama as opposed to
+tragedy--which is the touchstone of the novelist. Whatever his success
+might be, there can be no doubt as to his intentions. He meant his
+novels, with their richer background and their larger measure of detail,
+to sacrifice nothing of dramatic truth. _La Princesse de Cleves_, a
+professedly historical novel with little 'local colour', may be in
+essentials finer and more sincere than Scott. This is a question which I
+ask leave to pass over. But it is not Scott's intention to put off the
+reader with details and decoration as a substitute for truth of
+character and sentiment. Here most obviously, with all their
+differences, Balzac and Scott are agreed: expensive both of them in
+description, but neither of them inclined to let mere description (in
+Pope's phrase) take the place of sense--i.e. of the life which it is the
+business of the novelist to interpret. There is danger, no doubt, of
+overdoing it, but description in Balzac, however full and long, is never
+inanimate. He has explained his theory in a notice of Scott, or rather
+in a comparison of Scott and Fenimore Cooper (_Revue Parisienne_, 1840),
+where the emptiness of Cooper's novels is compared with the variety of
+Scott's, the solitude of the American lakes and forests with the crowd
+of life commanded by the author of _Waverley_. Allowing Cooper one great
+success in the character of Leather-stocking and some merit in a few
+other personages, Balzac finds beyond these nothing like Scott's
+multitude of characters; their place is taken by the beauties of nature.
+But description cannot make up for want of life in a story.
+
+Balzac shows clearly that he understood the danger of description, and
+how impossible, how unreasonable, it is to make scenery do instead of
+story and characters. He does not seem to think that Scott has failed in
+this respect, while in his remarks on Scott's humour he proves how far
+he is from the critics who found in Scott nothing but scenery and
+accoutrements and the rubbish of old chronicles. Scott's chivalry and
+romance are not what Balzac is thinking about. Balzac is considering
+Scott's imagination in general, his faculty in narrative and dialogue,
+wherever his scene may be, from whatever period the facts of his story
+may be drawn.
+
+Scott's superiority to his American rival comes out, says Balzac,
+chiefly in his secondary personages and in his talent for comedy. The
+American makes careful mechanical provision for laughter: Balzac takes
+this all to pieces, and leaves Scott unchallenged and inexhaustible.
+
+Scott's reputation has suffered a little through suspicion of his
+politics, and, strangely enough, of his religion. He has been made
+responsible for movements in Churches about which opinions naturally
+differ, but of which it is certain Scott never dreamed. Those who
+suspect and blame his work because it is reactionary, illiberal, and
+offensive to modern ideas of progress, are, of course, mainly such
+persons as believe in 'the march of intellect,' and think meanly of each
+successive stage as soon as it is left behind. The spokesman of this
+party is Mark Twain, who wrote a burlesque of the Holy Grail, and who in
+his _Life on the Mississippi_ makes Scott responsible for the vanities
+and superstitions of the Southern States of America:--
+
+     'The South has not yet recovered from the debilitating
+     influence of his books. Admiration of his fantastic heroes and
+     their grotesque "chivalry" doings and romantic juvenilities
+     still survives here, in an atmosphere in which is already
+     perceptible the wholesome and practical nineteenth century
+     smell of cotton-factories and locomotives.'
+
+It is useless to moralise on this, and the purport and significance of
+it may be left for private meditation to enucleate and enjoy. But it
+cannot be fully appreciated, unless one remembers that the author of
+this and other charges against chivalry is also the historian of the
+feud between the Shepherdsons and the Grangerfords, equal in tragedy to
+the themes of the _chansons de geste_: of _Raoul de Cambrai_ or _Garin
+le Loherain_. Mark Twain in the person of Huckleberry Finn is committed
+to the ideas of chivalry neither more nor less than Walter Scott in
+_Ivanhoe_ or _The Talisman_. I am told further--though this is perhaps
+unimportant--that Gothic ornament in America is not peculiarly the taste
+of the South, that even at Chicago there are imitations of Gothic towers
+and halls.
+
+Hazlitt, an unbeliever in most of Scott's political principles, is also
+the most fervent and expressive admirer of the novels, quite beyond the
+danger of modern progress, his judgment not corrupted at all by the
+incense of the cotton-factory or the charm of the locomotive. Hazlitt's
+praise of Scott is an immortal proof of Hazlitt's sincerity in
+criticism. Scott's friends were not Hazlitt's, and Scott and Hazlitt
+differed both in personal and public affairs as much as any men of their
+time. But Hazlitt has too much sense not to be taken with the Scotch
+novels, and too much honesty not to say so, and too much spirit not to
+put all his strength into praising, when once he begins. Hazlitt's
+critical theory of Scott's novels is curiously like his opinion about
+Scott's old friend, the poet Crabbe: whose name I cannot leave without a
+salute to the laborious and eloquent work of M. Huchon, his scholarly
+French interpreter.
+
+Hazlitt on Crabbe and Scott is a very interesting witness on account of
+the principles and presuppositions employed by him. In the last hundred
+years or so the problems of realism and naturalism have been canvassed
+almost too thoroughly between disputants who seem not always to know
+when they are wandering from the point or wearying their audience with
+verbiage and platitudes. But out of all the controversy there has
+emerged at least one plain probability--that there is no such thing as
+simple transference of external reality into artistic form. This is what
+Hazlitt seems to ignore very strangely in his judgment of Crabbe and
+Scott, and this is, I think, an interesting point in the history of
+criticism, especially when it is remembered that Hazlitt was a critic of
+painting, and himself a painter. He speaks almost as if realities passed
+direct into the verse of Crabbe; as if Scott's imagination in the novels
+were merely recollection and transcription of experience. Speaking of
+the difference between the genius of Shakespeare and Sir Walter Scott,
+he says:
+
+     'It is the difference between _originality_ and the want of
+     it, between writing and transcribing. Almost all the finest
+     scenes and touches, the great master-strokes in Shakespeare,
+     are such as must have belonged to the class of invention,
+     where the secret lay between him and his own heart, and the
+     power exerted is in adding to the given materials and working
+     something out of them: in the author of _Waverley_, not all,
+     but the principal and characteristic beauties are such as may
+     and do belong to the class of compilation--that is, consist in
+     bringing the materials together and leaving them to produce
+     their own effect....
+
+     'No one admires or delights in the Scotch Novels more than I
+     do, but at the same time, when I hear it asserted that his
+     mind is of the same class with Shakespeare, or that he
+     imitates nature in the same way, I confess I cannot assent to
+     it. No two things appear to me more different. Sir Walter is
+     an imitator of nature and nothing more; but I think
+     Shakespeare is infinitely more than this.... Sir Walter's mind
+     is full of information, but the "_o'er informing power_" is
+     not there. Shakespeare's spirit, like fire, shines through
+     him; Sir Walter's, like a stream, reflects surrounding
+     objects.'
+
+I may not at this time quote much more of Hazlitt's criticism, but the
+point of it would be misunderstood if it were construed as depreciation
+of Scott. What may be considered merely memory in contrast to
+Shakespeare's imagination is regarded by Hazlitt as a limitless source
+of visionary life when compared with the ideas of self-centred authors
+like Byron. This is what Hazlitt says in another essay of the same
+series:--
+
+     'Scott "does not 'spin his brains' but something much better."
+     He "has got hold of another clue--that of Nature and
+     history--and long may he spin it, 'even to the crack of
+     doom!'" Scott's success lies in not thinking of himself. "And
+     then again the catch that blind Willie and his wife and the
+     boy sing in the hollow of the heath--there is more mirth and
+     heart's ease in it than in all Lord Byron's _Don Juan_ or Mr.
+     Moore's _Lyrics_. And why? Because the author is thinking of
+     beggars and a beggar's brat, and not of himself, while he
+     writes it. He looks at Nature, sees it, hears it, feels it,
+     and believes that it exists before it is printed, hotpressed,
+     and labelled on the back _By the Author of 'Waverley.'_ He
+     does not fancy, nor would he for one moment have it supposed,
+     that his name and fame compose all that is worth a moment's
+     consideration in the universe. This is the great secret of his
+     writings--a perfect indifference to self."'
+
+Hazlitt appears to allow too little to the mind of the Author of
+_Waverley_--as though the author had nothing to do but let the contents
+of his mind arrange themselves on his pages. What this exactly may mean
+is doubtful. We are not disposed to accept the theory of the passive
+mind as a sufficient philosophical explanation of the Scotch novels. But
+Hazlitt is certainly right to make much of the store of reading and
+reminiscence they imply, and it is not erroneous or fallacious to think
+of all Scott's writings in verse or prose as peculiarly the fruits of
+his life and experience. His various modes of writing are suggested to
+him by the way, and he finds his art with no long practice when the
+proper time comes to use it. After all, is this not what was meant by
+Horace when he said that the subject rightly chosen will provide what is
+wanted in art and style?
+
+                   Cui lecta potenter erit res
+     Nec facundia deseret hunc nec lucidus ordo.
+
+It was chosen by Corneille as a motto for _Cinna_; it would do as a
+summary of all the writings of Scott.
+
+The Waverley Novels may be reckoned among the works of fiction that have
+had their origin in chance, and have turned out something different from
+what the author intended. Reading the life of Scott, we seem to be
+following a pilgrimage where the traveller meets with different
+temptations and escapes various dangers, and takes up a number of
+duties, and is led to do a number of fine things which he had not
+thought of till the time came for attempting them. The poet and the
+novelist are revealed in the historian and the collector of antiquities.
+Scott before _The Lay of the Last Minstrel_ looked like a young
+adventurer in the study of history and legend, who had it in him to do
+solid work on a large scale (like his edition of Dryden) if he chose to
+take it up. He is not a poet from the beginning like Wordsworth and
+Keats, devoted to that one service; he turns novelist late in life when
+the success of his poetry seems to be over. His early experiments in
+verse are queerly suggested and full of hazard. It needs a foreign
+language--German--to encourage him to rhyme. The fascination of Buerger's
+_Lenore_ is a reflection from English ballad poetry; the reflected image
+brought out what had been less remarkable in the original. The German
+devices of terror and wonder are a temptation to Scott; they hang about
+his path with their monotonous and mechanical jugglery, their horrors
+made all the more intolerable through the degraded verse of Lewis--a bad
+example which Scott instinctively refused to follow, though he most
+unaccountably praised Lewis's sense of rhythm. The close of the
+eighteenth century cannot be fully understood, nor the progress of
+poetry in the nineteenth, without some study of the plague of ghosts and
+skeletons which has left its mark on _The Ancient Mariner_, from which
+Goethe and Scott did not escape, which imposed on Shelley in his youth,
+to which Byron yielded his tribute of _The Vampire_. A tempting subject
+for expatiation, especially when one remembers--and who that has once
+read it can forget?--the most glorious passage in the _Memoirs_ of
+Alexandre Dumas describing his first conversation with the unknown
+gentleman who afterwards turned out to be Charles Nodier, in the theatre
+of the Porte Saint-Martin where the play was the _Vampire_: from which
+theatre Charles Nodier was expelled for hissing the _Vampire_, himself
+being part-author of the marvellous drama. I hope it is not impertinent
+in a stranger to express his unbounded gratitude for that delightful and
+most humorous dialogue, in which the history of the Elzevir Press
+(starting from _Le Pastissier francois_) and the tragedy of the rotifer
+are so adroitly interwoven with the theatrical scene of Fingal's Cave
+and its unusual visitors, the whole adventure ending in the happiest
+laughter over the expulsion of the dramatist. I may not have any right
+to say so, but I throw myself on the mercy of my hearers: I remember
+nothing in any chronicle so mercurial or jovial in its high spirits as
+this story of the first encounter and the beginning of friendship
+between Charles Nodier and Alexandre Dumas.
+
+The Vampire of Staffa may seem rather far from the range of Scott's
+imagination; but his contributions to Lewis's _Tales of Wonder_ show the
+risk that he ran, while the White Lady of Avenel in _The Monastery_
+proves that even in his best years he was exposed to the hazards of
+conventional magic.
+
+Lockhart has given the history of _The Lay of the Last Minstrel_, how
+the story developed and took shape. It is not so much an example of
+Scott's mode of writing poetry as an explanation of his whole literary
+life. _The Lay of the Last Minstrel_ was his first original piece of any
+length and his first great popular success. And, as Lockhart has
+sufficiently shown, it was impossible for Scott to get to it except
+through the years of exploration and editing, the collection of the
+Border ballads, the study of the old metrical romance of _Sir Tristrem_.
+The story of the Goblin Page was at first reckoned enough simply for one
+of the additions to the Border Minstrelsy on the scale of a ballad.
+Scott had tried another sort of imitation in the stanzas composed in old
+English and in the metre of the original to supply the missing
+conclusion of _Sir Tristrem_. It was not within his scope to write an
+original romance in the old language, but Coleridge's _Christabel_ was
+recited to him, and gave him a modern rhythm fit for a long story. So
+the intended ballad became the _Lay_, taking in, with the legend of
+Gilpin Horner for a foundation, all the spirit of Scott's knowledge of
+his own country.
+
+Here I must pause to express my admiration for Lockhart's criticism of
+Scott, and particularly for his description of the way in which the
+_Lay_ came to be written. It is really wonderful, Lockhart's sensible,
+unpretentious, thorough interpretation of the half-unconscious processes
+by which Scott's reading and recollections were turned into his poems
+and novels. Of course, it is all founded on Scott's own notes and
+introductions.
+
+What happened with the _Lay_ is repeated a few years afterwards in
+_Waverley_. The _Lay_, a rhyming romance; _Waverley_ an historical
+novel; what, it may be asked, is so very remarkable about their origins?
+Was it not open to any one to write romances in verse or prose? Perhaps;
+but the singularity of Scott's first romances in verse and prose is that
+they do not begin as literary experiments, but as means of expressing
+their author's knowledge, memory and treasured sentiment. Hazlitt is
+right; Scott's experience is shaped into the Waverley Novels, though one
+can distinguish later between those stories that belong properly to
+Scott's life and those that are invented in repetition of a pattern.
+
+Scott's own alleged reason for giving up the writing of tales in verse
+was that Byron beat him. But there must have been something besides
+this: it is plain that the pattern of rhyming romance was growing stale.
+The _Lay_ needs no apology; _Marmion_ includes the great tragedy of
+Scotland in the Battle of Flodden:--
+
+     The stubborn spearmen still made good
+     Their dark impenetrable wood,
+     Each stepping where his comrade stood,
+         The instant that he fell.
+     No thought was there of dastard flight;
+     Link'd in the serried phalanx tight,
+     Groom fought like noble, squire like knight,
+         As fearlessly and well;
+     Till utter darkness closed her wing
+     O'er their thin host and wounded king.
+
+And _The Lady of the Lake_ is all that the Highlands meant for Scott at
+that time. But _Rokeby_ has little substance, though it includes more
+than one of Scott's finest songs. _The Lord of the Isles_, though its
+battle is not too far below _Marmion_, and though its hero is Robert the
+Bruce, yet wants the original force of the earlier romances. When Scott
+changed his hand from verse to prose for story-telling and wrote
+_Waverley_, he not only gained in freedom and got room for a kind of
+dialogue that was impossible in rhyme, but he came back to the same sort
+of experience and the same strength of tradition as had given life to
+the _Lay_. The time of _Waverley_ was no more than sixty years since,
+when Scott began to write it and mislaid and forgot the opening chapters
+in 1805; he got his ideas of the Forty-five from an old Highland
+gentleman who had been out with the Highland clans, following the lead
+of Prince Charles Edward, the Young Chevalier. The clans in that
+adventure belonged to a world more ancient than that of _Ivanhoe_ or
+_The Talisman_; they also belonged so nearly to Scott's own time that he
+heard their story from one of themselves. He had spoken and listened to
+another gentleman who had known Rob Roy. _The Bride of Lammermoor_ came
+to him as the Icelandic family histories came to the historians of
+Gunnar or Kjartan Olafsson. He had known the story all his life, and he
+wrote it from tradition. The time of _The Heart of Midlothian_ is
+earlier than _Waverley_, but it is more of a modern novel than an
+historical romance, and even _Old Mortality_, which is earlier still, is
+modern also; Cuddie Headrigg is no more antique than Dandie Dinmont or
+the Ettrick Shepherd himself, and even his mother and her Covenanting
+friends are not far from the fashion of some enthusiasts of Scott's own
+time--e.g. Hogg's religious uncle who could not be brought to repeat his
+old ballads for thinking of 'covenants broken, burned and buried.' _Guy
+Mannering_ and _The Antiquary_ are both modern stories: it is not till
+_Ivanhoe_ that Scott definitely starts on the regular historical novel
+in the manner that was found so easy to imitate.
+
+If _Rob Roy_ is not the very best of them all--and on problems of that
+sort perhaps the right word may be the Irish phrase _Naboclish!_ ('don't
+trouble about that!') which Scott picked up when he was visiting Miss
+Edgeworth in Ireland--_Rob Roy_ shows well enough what Scott could do,
+in romance of adventure and in humorous dialogue. The plots of his
+novels are sometimes thought to be loose and ill-defined, and he tells
+us himself that he seldom knew where his story was carrying him. His
+young heroes are sometimes reckoned rather feeble and featureless.
+Francis Osbaldistone, like Edward Waverley and Henry Morton, drifts into
+trouble and has his destiny shaped for him by other people and
+accidents. But is this anything of a reproach to the author of the
+story? Then it must tell against some novelists who seem to work more
+conscientiously and carefully than Scott on the frame of their
+story--against George Meredith in Evan Harrington and Richard Feverel
+and Harry Richmond, all of whom are driven by circumstances and see
+their way no more clearly than Scott's young men. Is it not really the
+strength, not the weakness, of Scott's imagination that engages us in
+the perplexities of Waverley and Henry Morton even to the verge of
+tragedy--keeping out of tragedy because it is not his business, and
+would spoil his looser, larger, more varied web of a story? Francis
+Osbaldistone is less severely tried. His story sets him travelling, and
+may we not admire the skill of the author who uses the old device of a
+wandering hero with such good effect? The story is not a mere string of
+adventures--it is adventures with a bearing on the main issue, with
+complications that all tell in the end; chief among them, of course, the
+successive appearances of Mr. Campbell and the counsels of Diana Vernon.
+The scenes that bring out Scott's genius most completely--so they have
+always seemed to me--are those of Francis Osbaldistone's stay in
+Glasgow. Seldom has any novelist managed so easily so many different
+modes of interest. There is the place--in different lights--the streets,
+the river, the bridge, the Cathedral, the prison, seen through the
+suspense of the hero's mind, rendered in the talk of Bailie Nicol Jarvie
+and Andrew Fairservice; made alive, as the saying is, through successive
+anxieties and dangers; thrilling with romance, yet at the same time
+never beyond the range of ordinary common sense. Is it not a triumph, at
+the very lowest reckoning, of dexterous narrative to bring together in a
+vivid dramatic scene the humorous character of the Glasgow citizen and
+the equal and opposite humour of his cousin, the cateran, the Highland
+loon, Mr. Campbell disclosed as Rob Roy--with the Dougal creature
+helping him?
+
+Scott's comedy is like that of Cervantes in _Don Quixote_--humorous
+dialogue independent of any definite comic plot and mixed up with all
+sorts of other business. Might not Falstaff himself be taken into
+comparison too? Scott's humorous characters are nowhere and never
+characters in a comedy--and Falstaff, the greatest comic character in
+Shakespeare, is not great in comedy.
+
+Some of the rich idiomatic Scottish dialogue in the novels might be
+possibly disparaged (like Ben Jonson) as 'mere humours and observation.'
+Novelists of lower rank than Scott--Galt in _The Ayrshire Legatees_ and
+_Annals of the Parish_ and _The Entail_--have nearly rivalled Scott in
+reporting conversation. But the Bailie at any rate has his part to play
+in the story of _Rob Roy_--and so has Andrew Fairservice. Scott never
+did anything more ingenious than his contrast of those two
+characters--so much alike in language, and to some extent in cast of
+mind, with the same conceit and self-confidence, the same garrulous
+Westland security in their own judgment, both attentive to their own
+interests, yet clearly and absolutely distinct in spirit, the Bailie a
+match in courage for Rob Roy himself.
+
+Give me leave, before I end, to read one example of Scott's language:
+from the scene in _Guy Mannering_ where Dandie Dinmont explains his case
+to Mr. Pleydell the advocate. It is true to life: memory and imagination
+here indistinguishable:--
+
+     Dinmont, who had pushed after Mannering into the room, began
+     with a scrape of his foot and a scratch of his head in unison.
+     'I am Dandie Dinmont, sir, of the Charlies-hope--the
+     Liddesdale lad--ye'll mind me? It was for me you won yon
+     grand plea.'
+
+     'What plea, you loggerhead?' said the lawyer; 'd'ye think I
+     can remember all the fools that come to plague me?'
+
+     'Lord, sir, it was the grand plea about the grazing o' the
+     Langtae-head,' said the farmer.
+
+     'Well, curse thee, never mind;--give me the memorial, and come
+     to me on Monday at ten,' replied the learned counsel.
+
+     'But, sir, I haena got ony distinct memorial.'
+
+     'No memorial, man?' said Pleydell.
+
+     'Na, sir, nae memorial,' answered Dandie; 'for your honour
+     said before, Mr. Pleydell, ye'll mind, that ye liked best to
+     hear us hill-folk tell our ane tale by word o' mouth.'
+
+     'Beshrew my tongue that said so!' answered the counsellor; 'it
+     will cost my ears a dinning.--Well, say in two words what
+     you've got to say--you see the gentleman waits.'
+
+     'Ou, sir, if the gentleman likes he may play his ain spring
+     first; it's a' ane to Dandie.'
+
+     'Now, you looby,' said the lawyer, 'cannot you conceive that
+     your business can be nothing to Colonel Mannering, but that he
+     may not choose to have these great ears of thine regaled with
+     his matters?'
+
+     'Aweel, sir, just as you and he like, so ye see to my
+     business,' said Dandie, not a whit disconcerted by the
+     roughness of this reception. 'We're at the auld wark o' the
+     marches again, Jock o' Dawston Cleugh and me. Ye see we march
+     on the tap o' Touthoprigg after we pass the Pomoragrains; for
+     the Pomoragrains, and Slackenspool, and Bloodylaws, they come
+     in there, and they belang to the Peel; but after ye pass
+     Pomoragrains at a muckle great saucer-headed cutlugged stane,
+     that they ca' Charlie's Chuckie, there Dawston Cleugh and
+     Charlies-hope they march. Now, I say, the march rins on the
+     tap o' the hill where the wind and water shears; but Jock o'
+     Dawston Cleugh again, he contravenes that, and says that it
+     hauds down by the auld drove-road that gaes awa by the Knot o'
+     the Gate ower to Keeldar-ward--and that makes an unco
+     difference.'
+
+     'And what difference does it make, friend?' said Pleydell.
+     'How many sheep will it feed?'
+
+     'Ou, no mony,' said Dandie, scratching his head; 'it's lying
+     high and exposed--it may feed a hog, or aiblins twa in a good
+     year.'
+
+     'And for this grazing, which may be worth about five shillings
+     a-year, you are willing to throw away a hundred pound or two?'
+
+     'Na, sir, it's no for the value of the grass,' replied
+     Dinmont; 'it's for justice.'
+
+Do we at home in Scotland make too much of Scott's life and associations
+when we think of his poetry and his novels? Possibly few Scotsmen are
+impartial here. As Dr. Johnson said, they are not a fair people, and
+when they think of the Waverley Novels they perhaps do not always see
+quite clearly. Edinburgh and the Eildon Hills, Aberfoyle and Stirling,
+come between their minds and the printed page:--
+
+     A mist of memory broods and floats,
+       The Border waters flow,
+     The air is full of ballad notes
+       Borne out of long ago.
+
+It might be prudent and more critical to take each book on its own
+merits in a dry light. But it is not easy to think of a great writer
+thus discreetly. Is Balzac often judged accurately and coldly, piece by
+piece, here a line and there a line? Are not the best judges those who
+think of his whole achievement altogether--the whole amazing world of
+his creation--_La Comedie Humaine_? By the same sort of rule Scott may
+be judged, and the whole of his work, his vast industry, and all that
+made the fabric of his life, be allowed to tell on the mind of the
+reader.
+
+I wish this discourse had been more worthy of its theme, and of this
+audience, and of this year of heroic memories and lofty hopes. But if,
+later in the summer, I should find my way back to Ettrick and Yarrow and
+the Eildon Hills, it will be a pleasure to remember there the honour
+you have done me in allowing me to speak in Paris, however unworthily,
+of the greatness of Sir Walter Scott.
+
+
+
+
+Glasgow: Printed at the University Press by Robert MacLehose and Co. Ltd.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Sir Walter Scott, by William Paton Ker
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