Sir Walter Scott: A Lecture at the Sorbonne

by W. P. Ker

The stubborn spearmen still made good
Their dark impenetrable wood,
Each stepping where his comrade stood,
The instant that he fell.
No thought was there of dastard flight;
Link'd in the serried phalanx tight,
Groom fought like noble, squire like knight,
As fearlessly and well;
Till utter darkness closed her wing
O'er their thin host and wounded king.

And The Lady of the Lake is all that the Highlands meant for Scott at that time. But Rokeby has little substance, though it includes more than one of Scott's finest songs. The Lord of the Isles, though its battle is not too far below Marmion, and though its hero is Robert the Bruce, yet wants the original force of the earlier romances. When Scott changed his hand from verse to prose for story-telling and wrote Waverley, he not only gained in freedom and got room for a kind of dialogue that was impossible in rhyme, but he came back to the same sort of experience and the same strength of tradition as had given life to the Lay. The time of Waverley was no more than sixty years since, when Scott began to write it and mislaid and forgot the opening chapters in 1805; he got his ideas of the Forty-five from an old Highland gentleman who had been out with the Highland clans, following the lead of Prince Charles Edward, the Young Chevalier. The clans in that adventure belonged to a world more ancient than that of Ivanhoe or The Talisman; they also belonged so nearly to Scott's own time that he heard their story from one of themselves. He had spoken and listened to another gentleman who had known Rob Roy. The Bride of Lammermoor came to him as the Icelandic family histories came to the historians of Gunnar or Kjartan Olafsson. He had known the story all his life, and he wrote it from tradition. The time of The Heart of Midlothian is earlier than Waverley, but it is more of a modern novel than an historical romance, and even Old Mortality, which is earlier still, is modern also; Cuddie Headrigg is no more antique than Dandie Dinmont or the Ettrick Shepherd himself, and even his mother and her Covenanting friends are not far from the fashion of some enthusiasts of Scott's own time—e.g. Hogg's religious uncle who could not be brought to repeat his old ballads for thinking of 'covenants broken, burned and buried.' Guy Mannering and The Antiquary are both modern stories: it is not till Ivanhoe that Scott definitely starts on the regular historical novel in the manner that was found so easy to imitate.

If Rob Roy is not the very best of them all—and on problems of that sort perhaps the right word may be the Irish phrase Naboclish! ('don't trouble about that!') which Scott picked up when he was visiting Miss Edgeworth in Ireland—Rob Roy shows well enough what Scott could do, in romance of adventure and in humorous dialogue. The plots of his novels are sometimes thought to be loose and ill-defined, and he tells us himself that he seldom knew where his story was carrying him. His young heroes are sometimes reckoned rather feeble and featureless. Francis Osbaldistone, like Edward Waverley and Henry Morton, drifts into trouble and has his destiny shaped for him by other people and accidents. But is this anything of a reproach to the author of the story? Then it must tell against some novelists who seem to work more conscientiously and carefully than Scott on the frame of their story—against George Meredith in Evan Harrington and Richard Feverel and Harry Richmond, all of whom are driven by circumstances and see their way no more clearly than Scott's young men. Is it not really the strength, not the weakness, of Scott's imagination that engages us in the perplexities of Waverley and Henry Morton even to the verge of tragedy—keeping out of tragedy because it is not his business, and would spoil his looser, larger, more varied web of a story? Francis Osbaldistone is less severely tried. His story sets him travelling, and may we not admire the skill of the author who uses the old device of a wandering hero with such good effect? The story is not a mere string of adventures—it is adventures with a bearing on the main issue, with complications that all tell in the end; chief among them, of course, the successive appearances of Mr. Campbell and the counsels of Diana Vernon. The scenes that bring out Scott's genius most completely—so they have always seemed to me—are those of Francis Osbaldistone's stay in Glasgow. Seldom has any novelist managed so easily so many different modes of interest. There is the place—in different lights—the streets, the river, the bridge, the Cathedral, the prison, seen through the suspense of the hero's mind, rendered in the talk of Bailie Nicol Jarvie and Andrew Fairservice; made alive, as the saying is, through successive anxieties and dangers; thrilling with romance, yet at the same time never beyond the range of ordinary common sense. Is it not a triumph, at the very lowest reckoning, of dexterous narrative to bring together in a vivid dramatic scene the humorous character of the Glasgow citizen and the equal and opposite humour of his cousin, the cateran, the Highland loon, Mr. Campbell disclosed as Rob Roy—with the Dougal creature helping him?

Scott's comedy is like that of Cervantes in Don Quixote—humorous dialogue independent of any definite comic plot and mixed up with all sorts of other business. Might not Falstaff himself be taken into comparison too? Scott's humorous characters are nowhere and never characters in a comedy—and Falstaff, the greatest comic character in Shakespeare, is not great in comedy.

Some of the rich idiomatic Scottish dialogue in the novels might be possibly disparaged (like Ben Jonson) as 'mere humours and observation.' Novelists of lower rank than Scott—Galt in The Ayrshire Legatees and Annals of the Parish and The Entail—have nearly rivalled Scott in reporting conversation. But the Bailie at any rate has his part to play in the story of Rob Roy—and so has Andrew Fairservice. Scott never did anything more ingenious than his contrast of those two characters—so much alike in language, and to some extent in cast of mind, with the same conceit and self-confidence, the same garrulous Westland security in their own judgment, both attentive to their own interests, yet clearly and absolutely distinct in spirit, the Bailie a match in courage for Rob Roy himself.

Give me leave, before I end, to read one example of Scott's language: from the scene in Guy Mannering where Dandie Dinmont explains his case to Mr. Pleydell the advocate. It is true to life: memory and imagination here indistinguishable:—

Dinmont, who had pushed after Mannering into the room, began with a scrape of his foot and a scratch of his head in unison. 'I am Dandie Dinmont, sir, of the Charlies-hope—the Liddesdale lad—ye'll mind me? It was for me you won yon grand plea.'

'What plea, you loggerhead?' said the lawyer; 'd'ye think I can remember all the fools that come to plague me?'

'Lord, sir, it was the grand plea about the grazing o' the Langtae-head,' said the farmer.

'Well, curse thee, never mind;—give me the memorial, and come to me on Monday at ten,' replied the learned counsel.