Here in Edinburgh, on 7th June 1826, Walter Scott was kept awake nearly all night by a howling dog. He was in poor health. He was working at the highest pressure, convinced that such efforts might still recover his honour and perhaps even his fortune. His wife was barely three weeks dead. But he must not stop to think of that. He chides himself in his Gurnal for the ‘hysterical passion . . . of terrible violence—a sort of throttling sensation’ which impelled his solitary tears and was followed by ‘a state of dreaming stupidity’ (30th May).1 For all depended on work; and work on health; and health on sleep. In such circumstances we can imagine what most men would have said about that howling dog; especially most literary men. One thinks of Carlyle. What Scott said will be familiar to many members of this society: ‘Poor cur! I dare say he had his distresses, as I have mine.’2 In those dozen words the whole sweetness and light of Scott’s mind is revealed. I think I want to stress the light even more than the sweetness. We know from other evidence that few men have loved dogs more judiciously. As Lockhart’s Mr Adolphus delightfully says: ‘He was a gentleman even to his dogs.’3 But that is hardly the point here. There is no parade of his love for animals. He flings to the poor cur a word of commiseration, but what is chiefly before his mind is indisputable fact; dogs don’t howl at night if they are happy. There is here a clear-eyed recognition that there are in the world all sorts of creatures and that Scott with his distresses is only one of them. It is of a piece with his last recorded words, in answer to Lockhart’s question whether he should send for Sophia and Anne: ‘No. Don’t disturb them . . . I know they were up all night.’4 There is in both the same fidelity to common facts. Scott may be ruined, or bereaved, or dying; but dogs will howl and young women need sleep.
For the whole of that Gurnal, indeed, we might borrow a title from an author whom Scott himself fully appreciated, and call it ‘Sense and Sensibility’. The sense, I presume, is obvious enough. We see it, first and foremost, in his cool and moderate estimate of his own literary powers; a modesty almost (one would have thought) impossible in one whose reputation had filled Europe and been blown up until he was put above Goethe and almost equalled with Shakespeare. Yet it is not mere self-depreciation. Though never deceived about his weaknesses, he knows his real strength too; the ‘hurried frankness of composition which pleases soldiers[,] sailors[,] and young people of bold and active disposition’.5 He recognizes, in his own way, the quality of what a more pretentious writer would call ‘inspiration’:—‘I shall get warm as I work’—the morning, fresh from the labours of subconscious artistry, is musis amica. We see it also in his unchanging, cheerfully unemphatic, contempt for ‘the imaginary consequence of literary triflers’ and the ‘affectations of literature’. We see it, this time co-operating with something even more precious than good sense, in his attitude to certain feelings which prey upon most of us at time; as when he notes (6th April 1826):
I had the great pleasure to hear, through a letter from Sir Adam, that Sophia was in health, and John[n]ie gaining strength. It is a fine exchange from deep and aching uncertainty . . . to the little spitfire feeling of ‘Well, but they might have taken the trouble to write.’6
Of all who have ‘little spitfire feelings’, few, I believe, name them so honestly or so happily.
But we should do Scott little service with some modern critics by insisting exclusively on his sense; for there is a widespread opinion that genius is never free from neurosis, and unless we can find Angst in an author’s soul he will hardly be taken seriously. Well, if we demand Angst, Scott can supply that, too. He confesses to ‘idle fears[,] gloomy thoughts’ (11th April 1826);7 to ‘A thick throbbing at my heart . . . fancies thronging on me . . . a disposition . . . to think on things melancholy and horrible’ (24th October 1827).8 He notes repeatedly, and notes as irrational, a horror of ‘redding’ his papers, so great that the task would leave him with ‘nerves shaking like a frightened child’ (10th May 1829).9 He has known a day when there was ‘a vile sense of want of reality’ in all he did and said. He was aware of some connection between these infirmities and the powers which made him an author. These sinkings of the imagination ‘come to a gifted, as it is called, but often unhappy, class’, who, as he unexpectedly adds, ‘but for the dictates of religion, or the natural recoil of the mind from the idea of dissolution’, would often have been disposed to commit suicide (28th November 1826).10 All this, however, must be sought in the Gurnal and there alone. That, perhaps, is where Scott differs most from the type of artist dear to the modern psychological critic. The blue devils do not haunt his work; they leave no trail of laudanum, drink, divorce, tantrums, perversions, or paranoia across his life. As he says, ‘I generally affect good spirits in company of my family, whether I am enjoying them or not’ (24th September 1827).11
This is plainly a different thing from that ‘sincerity’ which is often praised, and which might perhaps better be called incontinence. Yet the Gurnal is, I believe, one of the sincerest books in the world, and (which is not exactly the same thing) full of self-knowledge. How severely he exercised this sincerity may be gauged by the entry of 5th March 1826, where, finding something that savours a little of rhodomontade in the entry of the previous evening, he says, ‘I have sworn I will not blot out what I have once written here.’12 I believe few of us would care to keep a diary under a strict rule against erasure. And to Scott such a rule would perhaps be more costly than to most men; Scott who rightly diagnosed pride as his ruling passion (5th February 1826), and who, when the pen dropped finally from his hand and irresistible tears from his eyes, said, ‘Friends, don’t let me expose myself—get me to bed.’13
The absence of the blue devils from his work, its freedom from all petulance, morbidity or shrillness, will not now, I am afraid, be regarded as wholly a virtue. Some will feel that, with the devils, much else, which ought to have come in, was excluded. We should certainly not guess from reading the Waverley Novels that their author had said in his diary, ‘Life could not be endured were it seen in reality’ (21st December 1925);14 or again, ‘I never have yet found . . . that ill-will dies in debt, or what is called gratitude distresses herself by frequent payments’ (2nd March 1826).15 Many moderns will think his maxim that ‘a melancholy catastrophe’ or unhappy ending should ‘always be avoided’ in fiction (28th July 1826),16 unsound and arbitrary in itself, and veritably disgraceful when we find it in conjunction with such dark estimates of life and men. This will seem to them, for all I have said about the sincerity of the man, to impute a fundamental dishonesty in the work.
But I think much can be said in answer to such a charge. In the first place, these tragic, or disillusioned passages in the Gurnal are only occasional, and spring very clearly from Scott’s momentary situation. We are not called upon to believe, and I myself do not believe, that they represent Scott’s settled criticism of life. And if they did, what then? Need we reject as worthless that gusto, that ease and good temper, that fine masculine cheerfulness, which is diffused over all the best of his novels and is perhaps their greatest permanent attraction? If this could be shown to be indeed inconsistent with Scott’s most permanent conscious thoughts, what should we have to say but that something in his less conscious mind, something that brought his stories to him while he slept, had taken over the pen and forced him to utter the life he experienced rather than the life he saw when he reflected. For, of course, something far more is involved than the mere choice between happy and unhappy endings. Both can be contrived, and both with good or bad motives. But the general tone, the thing that makes, as it were, the smell or taste of the whole book, cannot. In modern times we have been advised (and on the whole, I think, rightly) always to trust the tone or impression of a man’s work rather than his conscious and articulate reflections, where the two disagree. The maxim is, of course, most often applied by those who are finding concealed scepticism, prurience, or despair in authors professedly pious, edifying, or optimistic. Perhaps we shall have to use it the other way round for Scott, and say that the tapestry in Jonathan Oldbuck’s spare room, the language of Ochiltree, or the whole character of Baillie Nicol Jarvie, convey to us a sense of life which is more important, more fully realised, than any mere ‘views’ to the contrary which Scott may be supposed to have held.
Secondly—and this is of more importance to literature—I think any such criticism would involve trying Scott by laws which he never acknowledged. It is now very generally demanded that a novel should be ‘a comment on life’. Unless the meaning of this phrase is attenuated almost to nonentity, I do not think Scott supposed a novel to be anything of the sort. As Lord David Cecil has pointed out, the English novel descends from the English comedy. Not, of course, from English farce, nor necessarily from the comedy of intrigue; we must include under our definition of comedy things like The Merchant of Venice and Twelfth-Night. The purpose of the older novel, as of such pieces, was not to comment on life. I do not think that was the primary purpose of the tragedies either, nor of such novels as ended tragically. I do not think tragedy and comedy differed by expressing different views of life. The difference was more that between Forms. Both were deliberate patterns or arrangements of possible (but by no means necessarily probable) events chosen for their harmonious unity in variety, deliberately modified, contrasted, balanced in a fashion which real life never permits. Different degrees of verisimilitude occur in different pieces, but I think the verisimilitude is always a means, not an end. Improbability is avoided, when at all, not because the author wants to tell us what life is like, but because he fears lest too gross an improbability should make the audience incredulous and therefore unreceptive of the mood or passion he is trying to evoke. I think this was Scott’s attitude. He usually rejected unhappy endings not because he believed, or wanted his readers to believe, or even for a moment supposed they would believe, that irretrievable disasters never occurred in real life, but because they were inconsistent with the sort of work he was making and would not contribute to its οἰκεία ἡδоνή. He was not (save very incidentally) saying something about the world but making an objet d’art of a particular kind. If you like you may, no doubt, say that he was an entertainer; if you must, I suppose no one can prevent your saying ‘a mere entertainer’. That is, his work belongs with the Decameron, The Canterbury Tales, the Furioso (one of his own great favourites), The Marriage of Figaro, Pickwick, and The Moonstone; not with The Divine Comedy, War and Peace, or The Ring.
The distinction I am making is sometimes expressed by using the word serious of the works which fall in my second class. But I think the adjective unhappy because it is ambiguous. In one sense (and this I think is the most useful sense for critics) serious is simply the opposite of comic. In that sense, of course, Tupper and Patience Strong are serious artists, and Aristophanes is not. But serious may mean ‘worthy of serious consideration’. In that sense a gay song by Prior may be more serious than some of the most lugubrious items in our hymnbooks. What is more, a pure divertissement may be more serious than a long, well-documented, tendentious, ethical, or sociological novel: Guy Mannering more serious than Mr Britling Sees It Through.
There remains, however, a third sense in which Scott can be accused of insufficient seriousness. This has nothing to do with the genre he was writing. The Furioso is a light work, but Ariosto did not take it lightly; witness those famous variations in the first line. But Scott often took his work very lightly indeed. There is little sign, even in his best days, of a serious and costly determination to make each novel as good in its own kind as he could make it. And at the end, when he is writing to pay off his debts, his attitude to his own work is, by some standards, scandalous and cynical. Anything will do, provided it will sell. He says of Castle Dangerous and Count Robert of Paris, ‘I think it is the publick that are mad for passing these two volumes. But I will not be the first to cry them down’ (26th January 1832).17
Here we come to an irreducible opposition between Scott’s outlook and that of our more influential modern men of letters. These would blame him for disobeying his artistic conscience; Scott would have said he was obeying his conscience. He knew only one kind of conscience. It told him that a man must pay his debts if he possibly could. The idea that some supposed obligation to write good novels could override this plain, universal demand of honesty, would have seemed to him the most pitiful subterfuge of vanity and idleness, and a prime specimen of that ‘literary sensibility’ or ‘affected singularity’ which he most heartily despised.
Two different worlds here clash. And who am I to judge between them? It may be true, as Curtius has said, that ‘the modern world immeasurably overvalues art’. Or it may be that the modern world is right and that all previous ages have greatly erred in making art, as they did, subordinate to life, so that artists worked to teach virtue, to adorn the city, to solemnize feasts and marriages, to please a patron, or to amuse the people. Or again, a middle view may be possible; that works of art are in reality serious, and ends in themselves, but that all is lost when the artists discover this, as Eros fled when Psyche turned the lamp upon him. But wherever the truth may lie, there are two things of which I feel certain. One is, that if we do overvalue art, then art itself will be the greatest sufferer; when second things are put first, they are corrupted. The other is that, even if we of all generations have first valued art aright, yet there will certainly be loss as well as gain. We shall lose the fine careless, prodigal artists. For, if not all art, yet some art, flows best from men who treat their work as a kind of play. I at any rate cannot conceive how the exuberance, the elbow-room, the heart-easing quality of Dickens, or Chaucer, or Cervantes, could co-exist with that self-probing literary conscience we find in Pater or Henry James. Lockhart speaks somewhere of Scott ‘enjoying rather than exerting his genius’. We may be coming to a period when there will be no room for authors who do that. If so, I admit there may be gain; I am sure there will be losses.
This leads me naturally to the question of Scott’s style. One is sometimes tempted to say that the veriest journeyman among us could mend a thousand passages in the novels. Nothing could easily be worse than the sentence in which Mannering looks up and the planets ‘rolled’ above him, ‘each in its orbit of liquid light’.18 This, perhaps, is exceptional; what is unfortunately constant is the polysyllabic, uneconomical, even florid, texture of his narrative and descriptive writing. His dialogue, of course, is a wholly different thing. Let but Andrew Fairservice, or the Baillie, or douce Davie Deans, or Jonathan Oldbuck, or even Julia Mannering open their mouths, and at once we have race and piquancy, the living and the concrete. Most interestingly, in the Gurnal, we find Scott using in his own person both the style that repels and that which conquers us.
Thus he refers to the news of his wife’s death as ‘the melancholy intelligence’ (15th May 1826).19 What a choke-pear! And what a use of the word melancholy, how calculated to spoil it for contexts where it is really needed! Nor must we plead that Lady Scott was not, after all, the great passion of her husband’s life. That, I think, is true; but the phrase is still far too vague and ready-made for the deep affliction which her death was to him. He himself puts that beyond doubt by the words with which, next day, he expresses its precise nature and degree: ‘I wonder how I shall do with the large portion of thoughts which were hers for thirty years’ (16th May 1826).20 I think the experience of all bereavements, the daily and hourly setting out of the thoughts upon a familiar road, forgetful of the grim frontier-post that now blocks it, the repeated frustration which renews not only sorrow but the surprise of sorrow, has seldom been more truthfully conveyed.
Here is another example. On 18th December 1825 he is facing the thought that Abbotsford may have to be sold. He writes, ‘The recollection of the extensive woods I have planted, and the walks I have formed from which strangers must derive both the pleasure and profit will excite feelings likely to sober my gayest moments . . . My dogs will wait for me in vain.’21 This is, of course, better writing than ‘the melancholy intelligence’. But the vocabulary is curiously dead. Then comes a space in the MS; then the unconscious master-stroke—‘I find my dogs’ feet on my knees.’22
And this happens again and again in the Gurnal. We find side by side that style which Scott habitually used for narrative and another style, far more sensitive, which, if he had more often employed it, would have given him a far higher literary place than he actually holds. In the novels this better style hardly appears except in dialogue and (especially) in dialect. As a stylist Wandering Willie can play his creator off the field; he has more music in his sporran than the Sheriff in his whole body; and Julia Mannering, at her best, more wit.
For his public, and inferior, style reasons can be found, one local, the other historical. It was Professor Nichol Smith who first pointed out to me that a love of the polysyllable had been endemic in Scotland ever since the time of Henryson. He said that in this very city he himself had attended, in youth, a debating society where students were always rising ‘to homologate the sentiments of the previous speaker’. But in Scott’s time this local and national infirmity was only the aggravation of a disease which then held the whole island in its grip. We must not allow a few great and highly idiosyncratic writers like Lamb, Hazlitt, and Landor, to blind us to the fact that the early nineteenth century found English in a bloated condition. The abstract is preferred to the concrete. The word farthest from the soil is liked best; we find personage or individual for man, female for woman, monarch for king. Hence Wordsworth, even in poetry, will have his itinerant vehicle, female vagrant, and casual refreshment. Scott, I am afraid, nearly always called food refreshment, and is among those who have helped to spoil that potentially beautiful word for ever.
Stylistically, then, Scott lived in an unfortunate period, and his real strength was allowed to come out only in dialogue. This, I think, must be conceded. But let us not concede too much. Even his narrative style has the qualities of its defects. The cheerful rattle of his polysyllables (often energetic in rhythm even where flaccid in syntax and vocabulary), the very sense that not much care is being taken, and the brisk, virile pace, all help us to feel that we are off on a journey of pleasure. The jingle of the harness creates the holiday mood; and ‘with tolerable horses and a civil driver’ (as Scott promises in Waverley, ch. V) we jog along, on the whole, very contentedly.
But whatever may be said against Scott’s style or his contrived (and often ill-contrived) plots it will not touch the essential glory of the Waverley Novels. That glory is in my opinion, twofold.
First, these novels almost created that historical sense which we now all take for granted, and by which we often condemn Scott himself. Of course, he makes historical blunders and even treasures historical illusions. But he, first of men, taught us the feeling for period. Chaucer’s Trojans are medieval people. Shakespeare’s Romans are Elizabethan people. The characters in Otranto are so patently Walpole’s contemporaries that no one could now believe in them. Scott everywhere—insufficiently, no doubt, but he was a pioneer—reminds us that our ancestors were different from ourselves. I have high authority for my statement. It was the Master of Trinity, Professor Trevelyan, who first pointed out to me the difference in this respect between the Decline and Fall and Macaulay’s History. Gibbon, he said, writes as if every Roman emperor, every Gothic chieftain, and every hermit in the Thebaid, was an eighteenth-century man. But Macaulay is always pressing upon us the difference between his own age and the age he depicts. ‘And I attribute this almost wholly’, said the Master, ‘to the fact that the Waverley Novels had come in between.’ Once it had been said, it seemed to me obvious. And if it is, then to concentrate on Scott’s errors in history is like trying to make Columbus unimportant because he failed to produce a full map of America. Scott, like Columbus, is among the great discoverers. If we are now so conscious of period, that we feel more difference between decades than our ancestors felt between centuries, we owe this, for good or ill, to Scott.
Secondly, the novels embody these immensely valuable qualities of mind which I have claimed for the Gurnal. They may lack many virtues which the novel has achieved since; but they have those virtues of which no age is in more desperate need than our own. They have their own essential rectitude. They slur some things; they exaggerate nothing. Minor frailties are never worked up into enormous sins, nor petty distresses into factitious tragedies. Everything is in proportion. Consider what either Dickens on the one hand, or George Moore on the other, would have made of Effie Deans. Then turn back to Scott and breathe the air of sense.
But I must come to an end. You may feel that I have spent too much time on this great author’s faults and too little on his excellences. But that is because I am speaking among his friends. Where else does one mention the faults of a man one loves? And Scott today has few friends. Our juniors are ill at ease in his presence. One of these has said that Scott wholly misunderstood his own story in The Heart of Midlothian, for the tale makes it quite clear that the heroine’s real motive for refusing to commit perjury ‘must have been’ unconscious jealousy of her sister’s beauty. It is like reading a review by a jackal on a book written by a lion. But we must not grow bitter. Perhaps we shall some day climb out of this present trough; as Scott delighted to quote, ‘Patience, cousin, and shuffle the cards.’23 And even if no change ever comes, if the barbarism on which we now seem to be entering is to prove the last illness, the death-bed of humanity, we must not rail at those who are its victims. Let us only say, adapting Scott’s own words, ‘Poor curs. I dare say they have their distresses.’ And indeed they have.