SCOTT 



257 



In a brief record of his life it is impossible duly 

 to estimate Scott, as an author or as a man. The 

 greatness of his heart, the loyal affection and kind- 

 ness of his nature, are at least as remarkable as his 

 astonishing genius. There is only one voice as 

 to his goodness. He was the most generous, the 

 most friendly, the most honourable of men. In no 

 relation of life did he fall short of the highest excel- 

 lence. The magnetism (as we may call it for 

 want of a better word ) of his personality endeared 

 him not only to mankind, but to the lower animals. 

 Dogs, cats, and horses took to him at once. He 

 was even persecute*! by the affection of grotesque 

 friends, pigs and chickens. He is one of the few 

 who retain, after death, this power of making us 

 love those 'whom we have not seen.' Nor was he 

 less sagacious, in all affairs but his own, than he 

 was sympathetic. As a man of letters he was more 

 than generous, far from beingenvious.hecould hardly 

 even oe critical, and he admired contemporaries in 

 whom the judgment of |xjterity has seen little to 

 approve. In his lifetime the \\ nigs, as Whigs, did 

 not love him. He was a Tory. With a sympathy 

 for the poor, which showed itself not only m his 

 works, but in all his deeds, and in all his daily life, 

 he believed in subordination. All history snowed 

 him that equality had never existed, except in the 

 lowest savagerv ; and he could not believe in a 

 sudden reversal of experience. His tastes as a poet 

 also attached him to the antique world. His ideal 

 was, perhaps, a feudalism in which every order 

 and every man should be constant to duty. 

 Absentee landlords he condemned as much as 

 callous capitalist.*. He had seen the French 

 Revolution, he had witnessed various abortive ' 

 'risings' in the west country, and his later years ; 

 were saddened by apprehension of a Jacquerie. He 

 hated the mob as much as he loved the people, his 

 own people, the kindly Scots. He wan a sturdy \ 

 Scotchman ; but, says Lockhart, ' I believe that 

 had any anti-English faction, civil or religious, [ 

 sprung up in his own time in Scotland, he would 

 have done more than any other living man could i 

 have hoped to dp to put it down.' 



As a writer it is a truism to say that, since 

 Shakespeare, whom he resembled in many ways, 

 there has never been a genius so human and so 

 creative, so rich in humour, sympathy, poetry, so 

 fertile in the production of new and real characters, 

 as the genius of Sir Walter Scott. To think of the 

 Waverley novels is to think of a world of friends, 

 like the crowd whose faces rise on us at the name 

 of Shakespeare. To say this is to say enough, but 

 it must be added that scenes as well as people, 

 events as well as characters, are summoned up by 

 his magic wand. There is only one Shakespeare, j 

 however, and he possessed, what Scott lacked, 

 every splendour ana every glory of style. Of both 

 men it might be said that 'they never blotted a 

 line;' but the metal flowed from the furnace of 

 Shakespeare's brain into many a mould of form, all 

 magical and immortal in their beauty. Scott 

 ' never learned grammar,' as he said, ana his style 

 is that of an improviser. Its recklessness, and 

 occasional flatness, he knew as well as any of his 

 critics. But again and again, in published work, 

 as in unpublished letters, he owns himself to be 

 incapableof correcting, and impatient of the labour 

 of the file. In proofs he corrected freely, but 

 seldom to improve the style. It is often lax, and 

 even commonplace ; it rarely approaches distinc- 

 tion. It is at its best, absolutely perfect indeed, in 

 liis Scotch dialogue. Nor was he more careful of 

 his plots. In the introduction to the Fortunes of 

 Nigel he shows us exactly how he worked, incapa- 

 ble of laying down the lines of a plot, and sticking 

 to them, following always where fancy led him, 

 after Dugald Dalgetty, or Bailie Nicol Jarvie. 



Delay, painstaking, would not have made him a 

 more finished writer, and would have deprived us 

 of many a Waverley novel. Every man must do 

 his work as he may : speed was Scott's way. The 

 only real drawback to his unapproached excellence, 

 then, is this congenital habit of haste, this quick- 

 ness of spirit, which, as Lady Louisa Stuart said, 

 made him weary of his characters long before his 

 readers were weary. Yet his genius triumphs in 

 his own despite, and what he wrote for the amuse- 

 ment of a generation is fashioned for immortality, 

 living with the fiery and generous life of his own 

 heroic heart. Scott's poetry suffers more from his 

 ' hasty glance and random rhyme ' than his prose, 

 because from poetry more exquisite finish is 

 expected. That finish is only to be found in his 

 lyrics, the freshest, most musical, most natural 

 and spirited of English verses. In his metrical 

 romances he has spirit, speed, ringing cadences, * 

 all the magic of romance, all the grace of chivalry. 

 Since Homer no man has written so much in 

 Homer's mood, so largely, so bravely, with such 

 delight in battle. But ' the grand style ' is absent, 

 save in the more inspired passages. Scott's lays are 

 lighted with the Border sun, now veiled in mists, 

 now broken with clouds : we are not here in tho 

 wide and luminous ether of Homer and of Hellas. 



Wild as cloud, as stream, as gale, 

 Flow forth, flow unrestrained, my tale t 



he exclaims, in lines addressed to Erskine, conscious 

 of his fault, but impenitent. His fame must suffer 

 in some degree from his own wilfnlness, or, rather, 

 from the incurable defect of a genius which was 

 rich, but not rare ; abundant', but seldom fine. It 

 may suffice for one man to have come nearer than 

 any other mortal to Shakespeare in his fiction, and 

 nearer than any other mortal to Homer in his 

 verse. His influence on literature was immense. 

 The Komantic movement in France owed nearly as 

 much to him as to Shakespeare. Alexander Djimas 

 is his literary foster-child, and his only true suc- 

 cessor. To him also is due the beginning of a 

 better appreciation of all ancient popular antiqui- 

 ties, and a more human understanding of history. 



The best source for information about Scott's life 

 is, necessarily, Lockhart's biography (1M and best ed., 

 10 vols., 1839). It has been supplemented by the 

 Journal (2 vol*., 1890), and by the Familiar Letters 

 (2 vols., 1893). The Ballantyne Humbug and the 

 Refutation may be studied, by people who must study 

 them, in various editions of 1838-39. There is much 

 interesting matter in Mr R. P. Gillies' Recollections of 

 Sir Walter Scott <1837), and some amusing anecdotes in 

 Hogg's fJonieitic Manners and Private Life of Sir Walter 

 Scvtt (1834), though the Shepherd is a garrulous and 

 graceless witness. Mr Carruthers' Abboliford Notanda 

 contains a few facts worth noting, and so does the 

 Catalogue of the Centenary Exhibition. The Catalogue 

 of the Abbotsford Library is a valuable index to ms 

 studies, and there are letters of some importance in 

 Archibald Constable and his Literary Correspondents 

 (1873). In 1872 Mr Hope-Scott published a reprint of 

 Lockhart's condensed version of the Life, with a prefatory 

 letter to Mr Gladstone. An interesting parallel between 

 Homer and Scott is in Jebb's Introduction to Homer 

 (1887). 



Scott B works, especially the novels, have been trans- 

 lated into almost every civilised tongue, and he lias had 

 imitators in all languages. There are several French 

 translations, of varying merit. In German the best are 

 those associated with the names of Hermann (new ed. 

 1876) and Tschischwitz (1876) ; the Life by Elze (18fi4 )is 

 notable. See also the articles in this work on Abbotsford, 

 Dryburgh, Ballantyne, Laidlaw, "Lockhart, Hope-Scott, 

 Ballad, Novels, and Romanticism. 



Scott, W. BELL. See SCOTT (DAVID). 



Scott, WlNFlELD, an American general, was 

 l>orn near Petersburg, Virginia, 13th June, 1786. 

 He was educated at William and Mary College, 



