Upon our first visit to Scotland we kept low company; but now we return to dwell in a castle, and play the host to our Sovereign Lord the King.
Walter Scott was born in Edinburgh in 1771, the son of a prosperous lawyer who held the high office of sheriff. The father made a specialty of his country’s antiquities, and the boy was brought up, as it were, in the property-room of a moving picture studio. He was lame, which made it impossible for him to repeat the valorous deeds of his ancestors; so he took to dreams, and gave the world a new form of art, the historical romance.
The French revolution occurred in his youth, and he reacted from it as did all his class. It was the job of British Toryism to crush the republican idea; with money derived from the trade of the whole world, it subsidized the kings and emperors of Europe in their attacks upon France. The result was to raise up Napoleon, and before Napoleon was beaten Europe had waded through twenty-five years of blood. Walter Scott’s function was to glorify the ancient loyalties and pieties in whose name that world-crime was committed; and for his services he was made a baronet, and paid a million dollars, equal to five or ten times as much in our money.
Personally he was a generous and kindly gentleman, but he lent his name and influence to the most vicious rowdies of his party. Nor was he content with writing; he turned out and did his part as a smasher of the “Reds.” At the age of forty-one we find him writing to the poet Southey like an earlier incarnation of Attorney-General Palmer. “You are quite right in apprehending a Jacquerie; the country is mined below our feet.” He goes on to tell how he discovered a meeting of weavers in a large manufacturing village, and how he did his duty as an officer of the law. “I apprehended the ringleaders and disconcerted the whole project; but in the course of my inquiries, imagine my surprise at discovering a bundle of letters and printed manifestoes, from which it appeared that the Manchester Weavers’ Committee corresponds with every manufacturing town in the South and West of Scotland, and levies a subsidy of 2s. 6d. per man—(an immense sum)—for the ostensible purpose of petitioning Parliament for redress of grievances, but doubtless to sustain them in their revolutionary movements. An energetic administration, which had the confidence of the country, would soon check all this; but it is our misfortune to lose the pilot when the ship is on the breakers. But it is sickening to think of our situation.”
Walter Scott’s literary career began with narrative poems based upon the love-makings and quarrelings of old Scottish chieftains. Then he began writing novels on these same themes, and it was as if he had struck a pick into a pit full of golden nuggets. To his Tory age he came as a heaven-sent magician with exactly the right spells to prop up the tottering old system. The public began to buy the Waverley novels so fast that it was impossible to get them bound in time. England went wild over them, and Europe as well; one million, four hundred thousand volumes were sold in France alone. This was the time of the “Holy Alliance,” and another King Louis had been set upon the French throne.
It was not quite the proper thing for an eminent legal gentleman to write novels, so Scott published the books anonymously, and always denied their authorship; but he did not refuse to take the money. He was a fluent writer, and could turn out a volume in a month or six weeks, and would get a thousand pounds before he had finished it. Never was there such prosperity, since the days of Aladdin and his wonderful lamp.
Our Tory novelist was a big overgrown boy; he could never have written such propaganda otherwise. He began to spend his money as a boy would spend it—to make real the world of chivalry and romance in nineteenth century Scotland, fully launched into the age of capitalist industrialism! He built himself an imitation castle of colossal size, “with a tall tower at either end ... sundry zigzagged gables ... a myriad of indentations and parapets, and machicolated eaves; most fantastic waterspouts; labelled windows, not a few of them painted glass ... stones carved with heraldries innumerable.” And inside, of course, were all the stage properties, “cuirasses, helmets, swords of every order, from the claymore and rapier to some German executioner’s swords.” Here our hero kept open house to all the world of rank and fashion, with gay hunting parties and dances, drinking bouts, and singing of ballads and the sounding of pibrochs. It was his aim, in his own words, “to found a family”; besides becoming a baron, he married his eldest son to an heiress, and the climax of his career came when King George IV came to visit his northern dominion, and to be the novelist’s guest.
It so happened that this king was an odious fat lecher; but that made no difference, he was Sir Walter’s Most Gracious and Sovereign Lord. In an ecstasy of loyalty, the novelist took possession of a glass from which His Majesty had drunk a toast. This was to be preserved as the most sacred of the treasures of Abbotsford; but, alas, the novelist put it in his pocket, and in a moment of absent-mindedness sat down on it, and cut himself severely! It did not occur to his pious soul that this might be an effort of Providence to teach him something about drinking, or about the worship of lecherous kings.
Here in Hollywood we see these magic castles arise on the movie lots; we see the costumes reproduced with minute exactitude, and then surmounting them we see the heads of screen dolls, male and female, lounge lizards and jazz dancers and queens from department stores and manicure parlors. And just so it is in the novels of Sir Walter: the costumes and scenery are those of old-time Scotland, but the characters are the gentlemen and servants and tenants of Scott’s own neighborhood. He had creative energy and a sense of humor, he makes the game very real, and we can enjoy it, provided we know what we are getting. It is not even Scott’s own time, it is merely the Tory propaganda of that time. It is medievalism and absolutism dressed up and glorified, with every trace of blood and filth and horror wiped away; a fictionized sermon upon the text: Vote the Conservative ticket.
But alas for the dreams of stand-pat poets! First came the ruin of his personal hopes. Among the rascals of his gang were two who persuaded him into a publishing business, to reap the millions out of his popularity. They stole everything in sight, and then went bankrupt, and left him at the age of fifty-five with a debt of a hundred and seventeen thousand pounds. He set to work to write pot-boilers and pay it off; an action which has made him a hero to his biographers. And of course, it is an honorable thing for an artist to pay his debts; we all know that most disagreeable of characters, the Bohemian genius who borrows from everybody he meets and repays nothing. But it seems necessary to point out that a novelist owes two debts; one to his business creditors, and the other to those who are to read his books in future time. We are not satisfied with Sir Walter’s pot-boilers, and we deny that a man of genius has a right to drive himself to death and bring on a stroke of paralysis in four years, in order to satisfy a romantic dream of honor.