WALTER SCOTT
By HAMILTON W. MABIE
Author and Editor
 | ||
| MENTOR GRAVURES | MENTOR GRAVURES | |
| [LUCY AND THE MASTER] | [FLORA MacIVOR] | |
| "The Bride of Lammermoor" | "Waverley" | |
| [THE BLACK KNIGHT AT THE HERMITAGE] | [MEG MERRILIES DIRECTS BERTRAM TO THE CAVE] | |
| "Ivanhoe" | "Guy Mannering" | |
| [VARNEY, LEICESTER AND AMY ROBSART] | [EFFIE DEANS AND GEORDIE] | |
| "Kenilworth" | "Heart of Midlothian" | |
| Bust of Sir Walter Scott | By Sir Francis Chantrey |
THE MENTOR · DEPARTMENT OF LITERATURE
SEPTEMBER 15, 1916
Entered as second-class matter March 10, 1913, at the postoffice at New York, N. Y., under the act of March 3, 1879. Copyright, 1916, by The Mentor Association, Inc.
A NOTED English critic said that he never sat down to write about Sir Walter Scott without a sense of elation and happiness; and he might have added without a sense of satisfaction. For the author of the Waverley Novels was a clean, wholesome, loyal human soul. The out-of-door vigor of the Highlands found in him not only a chronicler but an incarnation. At the end, when his strength was failing, his brain becoming darkened, the battle apparently going against him, his struggle against disaster became a moral victory and his character took on heroic proportions. At a time when so much writing is impaired by egotism, and mental and moral disease give prose and verse the odor of the hospitals, Scott brings a tonic atmosphere with him.
He was a fortunate man; he was born in a country which he understood, at a time when the men, women, and events he wrote about were in the past but not too far in the past; and he was well born in the best sense. He came at the right time, in the right place, and of the right ancestry. In a word, he was in harmony with the conditions of his life, and he was spared the antagonism which often bends and sometimes breaks a promising talent and distorts a wholesome nature. Like Goethe he had a methodical father, of orderly habit, and a mother of generous heart, a vivid memory and the gift of pictorial talk. He said of her that if he had been able to paint past times it was largely because of "the studies with which she presented me." She had talked with a man who remembered the battle of Dunbar; and the day before her last illness she told, with great accuracy of detail, the real story of the Bride of Lammermoor, and indicated the points in which it differed from her son's famous novel. To his father Scott owed his steadiness of aim and his indomitable industry; to his mother he owed his vivid energy of mind, his tireless curiosity.
PORTRAIT OF SCOTT