A GLIMPSE OF ABBOTSFORD
In 1805 Scott was the most popular poet in Great Britain. He had opened a fresh field, he had command of the magic of romance which always has and always will, in spite of temporary changes of taste, cast a spell over the imagination of men; his style was simple and his method plain; all classes of readers could understand him. During the next ten years he published six or seven long poems of varying merit. When the last of these, "The Lord of the Isles," appeared in 1815, the popular interest had diminished in volume and intensity, and the poet was in serious financial difficulties as the result of his lavish scale of living and the mismanagement of his business enterprises.
The Waverley Novels
At the moment when ruin faced him he found himself suddenly in the possession of a great income from an unexpected source. In 1805 he had written, almost at a sitting, an instalment of a story of the uprising of 1745 in a futile attempt to restore the exiled Stuart, Charles Edward, to the throne. In 1814 he completed the story and published it anonymously under the title of "Waverley." The novel was written in what the oarsmen call a "spurt"; not because the novelist was writing carelessly at breakneck speed for immediate income, but because he was a tremendous worker and more concerned with the general movement and human interest of the story in hand than with the details of its workmanship. To immense energy of mind and body Scott united patience and methodical habits of work, as he added to a romantic imagination keen interest in the business of life and in the smallest detail of practical affairs. His appetite for facts was as marked as his capacity for sentiment. Scott had breadth and vigor rather than delicacy of imagination; that is one reason why he is out of fashion at a time when men want to know not only what people do but why and how they do it. He saw men and events in the rough; he was interested in striking historical incidents and events, in strongly-marked characters, in actions rather than in moods. In a word, Scott was a writer who took the world as he found it, and described it as he saw it, without any strong desire to reform it. He was a Tory in politics, a strong adherent of an ordered society; a good, sound man not haunted by misgiving and questioning about the general order of things.
Scott's novels were literally poured out during fifteen wonderful years; and even then the broken man could still apply the whip to his exhausted and crippled brain. The popular success of the novels was unprecedented in the history of literature. It is estimated that Scott earned with his pen not less than three-quarters of a million dollars. The earlier stories were the best: "The Antiquary," "Old Mortality," "Rob Roy," "Heart of Midlothian," "Guy Mannering." These were followed by the series of semi-historical novels with their brilliant historical portraits: "Ivanhoe," the most popular though by no means the best of Scott's stories, "The Monastery," "The Abbot," "Kenilworth," "Quentin Durward," "The Bride of Lammermoor," "The Talisman."
THE EMPTY CHAIR, ABBOTSFORD
From the painting by Sir W. Allan, R. A., in the Royal Collection
The defects of these novels and those which came later have been clearly pointed out since the analytical novel and the novel of purpose have come into vogue. Scott did not command the constructive skill of even the second-rate novelist of today; he was often an awkward builder and clumsy in putting his materials together in a coherent whole; his style is often loose and diffuse; he dealt largely with the outside of the spectacle of living; his women have no magic of loveliness, no mystery of temperament, though they sometimes stand out with great distinctness; his heroes are rarely heroic, they are often commonplace.
Scott was the chronicler of feudalism, the primitive social order of the clan, of an aristocratic society. He was as little interested in Democracy as was Shakespeare; and largely for the same reason: his age was not anti-democratic, it had not reached the democratic stage. Bagehot, the famous English critic, put his limitations under two heads: he gives us the stir of the world but not its soul, and he leaves the abstract intellect unreported.