Sir Walter Scott: A Lecture at the Sorbonne

by W. P. Ker

'Scott "does not 'spin his brains' but something much better." He "has got hold of another clue—that of Nature and history—and long may he spin it, 'even to the crack of doom!'" Scott's success lies in not thinking of himself. "And then again the catch that blind Willie and his wife and the boy sing in the hollow of the heath—there is more mirth and heart's ease in it than in all Lord Byron's Don Juan or Mr. Moore's Lyrics. And why? Because the author is thinking of beggars and a beggar's brat, and not of himself, while he writes it. He looks at Nature, sees it, hears it, feels it, and believes that it exists before it is printed, hotpressed, and labelled on the back By the Author of 'Waverley.' He does not fancy, nor would he for one moment have it supposed, that his name and fame compose all that is worth a moment's consideration in the universe. This is the great secret of his writings—a perfect indifference to self."'

Hazlitt appears to allow too little to the mind of the Author of Waverley—as though the author had nothing to do but let the contents of his mind arrange themselves on his pages. What this exactly may mean is doubtful. We are not disposed to accept the theory of the passive mind as a sufficient philosophical explanation of the Scotch novels. But Hazlitt is certainly right to make much of the store of reading and reminiscence they imply, and it is not erroneous or fallacious to think of all Scott's writings in verse or prose as peculiarly the fruits of his life and experience. His various modes of writing are suggested to him by the way, and he finds his art with no long practice when the proper time comes to use it. After all, is this not what was meant by Horace when he said that the subject rightly chosen will provide what is wanted in art and style?

Cui lecta potenter erit res
Nec facundia deseret hunc nec lucidus ordo.

It was chosen by Corneille as a motto for Cinna; it would do as a summary of all the writings of Scott.

The Waverley Novels may be reckoned among the works of fiction that have had their origin in chance, and have turned out something different from what the author intended. Reading the life of Scott, we seem to be following a pilgrimage where the traveller meets with different temptations and escapes various dangers, and takes up a number of duties, and is led to do a number of fine things which he had not thought of till the time came for attempting them. The poet and the novelist are revealed in the historian and the collector of antiquities. Scott before The Lay of the Last Minstrel looked like a young adventurer in the study of history and legend, who had it in him to do solid work on a large scale (like his edition of Dryden) if he chose to take it up. He is not a poet from the beginning like Wordsworth and Keats, devoted to that one service; he turns novelist late in life when the success of his poetry seems to be over. His early experiments in verse are queerly suggested and full of hazard. It needs a foreign language—German—to encourage him to rhyme. The fascination of Bürger's Lenore is a reflection from English ballad poetry; the reflected image brought out what had been less remarkable in the original. The German devices of terror and wonder are a temptation to Scott; they hang about his path with their monotonous and mechanical jugglery, their horrors made all the more intolerable through the degraded verse of Lewis—a bad example which Scott instinctively refused to follow, though he most unaccountably praised Lewis's sense of rhythm. The close of the eighteenth century cannot be fully understood, nor the progress of poetry in the nineteenth, without some study of the plague of ghosts and skeletons which has left its mark on The Ancient Mariner, from which Goethe and Scott did not escape, which imposed on Shelley in his youth, to which Byron yielded his tribute of The Vampire. A tempting subject for expatiation, especially when one remembers—and who that has once read it can forget?—the most glorious passage in the Memoirs of Alexandre Dumas describing his first conversation with the unknown gentleman who afterwards turned out to be Charles Nodier, in the theatre of the Porte Saint-Martin where the play was the Vampire: from which theatre Charles Nodier was expelled for hissing the Vampire, himself being part-author of the marvellous drama. I hope it is not impertinent in a stranger to express his unbounded gratitude for that delightful and most humorous dialogue, in which the history of the Elzevir Press (starting from Le Pastissier françois) and the tragedy of the rotifer are so adroitly interwoven with the theatrical scene of Fingal's Cave and its unusual visitors, the whole adventure ending in the happiest laughter over the expulsion of the dramatist. I may not have any right to say so, but I throw myself on the mercy of my hearers: I remember nothing in any chronicle so mercurial or jovial in its high spirits as this story of the first encounter and the beginning of friendship between Charles Nodier and Alexandre Dumas.

The Vampire of Staffa may seem rather far from the range of Scott's imagination; but his contributions to Lewis's Tales of Wonder show the risk that he ran, while the White Lady of Avenel in The Monastery proves that even in his best years he was exposed to the hazards of conventional magic.

Lockhart has given the history of The Lay of the Last Minstrel, how the story developed and took shape. It is not so much an example of Scott's mode of writing poetry as an explanation of his whole literary life. The Lay of the Last Minstrel was his first original piece of any length and his first great popular success. And, as Lockhart has sufficiently shown, it was impossible for Scott to get to it except through the years of exploration and editing, the collection of the Border ballads, the study of the old metrical romance of Sir Tristrem. The story of the Goblin Page was at first reckoned enough simply for one of the additions to the Border Minstrelsy on the scale of a ballad. Scott had tried another sort of imitation in the stanzas composed in old English and in the metre of the original to supply the missing conclusion of Sir Tristrem. It was not within his scope to write an original romance in the old language, but Coleridge's Christabel was recited to him, and gave him a modern rhythm fit for a long story. So the intended ballad became the Lay, taking in, with the legend of Gilpin Horner for a foundation, all the spirit of Scott's knowledge of his own country.

Here I must pause to express my admiration for Lockhart's criticism of Scott, and particularly for his description of the way in which the Lay came to be written. It is really wonderful, Lockhart's sensible, unpretentious, thorough interpretation of the half-unconscious processes by which Scott's reading and recollections were turned into his poems and novels. Of course, it is all founded on Scott's own notes and introductions.

What happened with the Lay is repeated a few years afterwards in Waverley. The Lay, a rhyming romance; Waverley an historical novel; what, it may be asked, is so very remarkable about their origins? Was it not open to any one to write romances in verse or prose? Perhaps; but the singularity of Scott's first romances in verse and prose is that they do not begin as literary experiments, but as means of expressing their author's knowledge, memory and treasured sentiment. Hazlitt is right; Scott's experience is shaped into the Waverley Novels, though one can distinguish later between those stories that belong properly to Scott's life and those that are invented in repetition of a pattern.

Scott's own alleged reason for giving up the writing of tales in verse was that Byron beat him. But there must have been something besides this: it is plain that the pattern of rhyming romance was growing stale. The Lay needs no apology; Marmion includes the great tragedy of Scotland in the Battle of Flodden:—