Sir Walter Scott.
After a painting by Sir Thomas Lawrence.
“TALES OF A GRANDFATHER”
to write no more about Civilization, “he dislikes it extremely.” One remembers how tiresome were the chapters on Civilization, except that on the Feudal System. Of the little that the world used to know about Scottish history, three-quarters were learned from The Tales of a Grandfather. Necessarily much more “scientific” information has since been acquired, and Mr. Fraser Tytler’s History is a monument of impartial industry. But Scott, as impartial as Tytler, gives us the cream of the anecdotes and semi-historical legends, which are what everybody ought to know. He does not disdain the garrulous Pitscottie, and the lively memoirs of Sir James Melville, these pillars of “history, as she is wrote,” and ought not, scientifically speaking, to be written any longer.
Yet there are senses in which The Tales of a Grandfather are scientifically composed. There is little science in writing books so dull that no mortal can read them, and this reef ahead of the modern pedant Scott successfully avoids. He lets “the violet of a legend blow” in periods of the utmost aridity, he “loads every reef,” however granitic, with the gold of every anecdote that reveals the character of individuals or of the time. If a scrap of ballad illustrates his topic, he has that scrap in his wallet. Thus the great Montrose fought for a sacred cause, the wretched Lord Lewis Gordon, an unworthy leader of a clan of soldiers, fought from caprice. The ballad verse runs,
If you with Lord Lewis go,
You’ll get reif and prey enough,
If you with Montrose go,
You’ll get grief and wae enough—
hard won victories and forced marches. Scott’s treatment of that battlefield of rival sentimentalists, Kirk and Cavalier—the time of the Civil War and the Restoration—is marked by lucidity, conciseness, and impartiality. Any boy of ten can understand it if he pleases, and the writer flatters neither Presbyterian nor King’s man.