Sir Walter Scott: A Lecture at the Sorbonne

A Lecture at the Sorbonne, May 22, 1919, in the series of Conférences Louis Liard
BY WILLIAM PATON KER, LL.D.
GLASGOW MACLEHOSE, JACKSON AND CO. PUBLISHERS TO THE UNIVERSITY 1919
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.
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 Odéon, 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 héroïdes sublimes, mais toujours les mêmes, et de beaucoup de tragédies mortellement ennuyeuses, n'est point du tout le chef des romantiques.
'S'il se trouvait un homme que les traducteurs à la toise se disputassent également à Madrid, à Stuttgard, à Paris et à Vienne, l'on pourrait avancer que cet homme a deviné les tendances morales de son époque.'