BOOKS

Great Scott HUGH TREVOR-ROPER

Anniversaries have their uses: that arbitrary impulse may start an overdue swing of the pendulum. The bi-centenary of Sir Walter Scott's birth is coming up, in 1971, and al- ready the commemorative volumes are be- ginning to appear. I happen to admire Scott : I think him a great novelist, a great historical innovator, and a fascinating personality; but I have long felt isolated in this admiration. Now I begin to feel in the fashion.

The trouble is, my generation was made to read Scott (as we read so many of our classics, if we read them at all) too 'Young.

We were also made to read the wrong novels - Ivanhoe, Kenilworth, Quentin Durward, etc. These were the hurried products of his later pen, when need pressed him and he had learned to gratify, almost without effort, the taste which he had created. It was through them that he exercised his greatest influence, both in England and abroad, both in litera- ture and in historical writing: an influence, I believe, almost wholly bad. But a writer should not be judged by what other people make of him. He should be judged by his best works, and they should be judged only by themselves.

I suppose that, if it had not been for an- other arbitrary impulse, I would have dropped the Waverley novels long ago. But I happened to be brought up on the Anglo- Scottish Border and came to know Scott's country intimately. To me he was, and is, a

tutelary genius of the hills and moors and valleys which I know best. So, after a pause to forget Kenilworth, I found myself return- ing to the great novels - those marvellous novels written between 1814 and 1820 - and discovered that the genius loci was also a universal genius. Waverley, Guy Alannering, Old Mortality, Heart of Midlothian - these are surely permanent classics of our litera-

ture, unjustly ignored. 1 have often asked myself why they are so neglected, and I can only suppose that it is because they are not tried. Certainly the neglect rarely sur- vives the trial. Those of my friends whom 1 have persuaded to make the trial have generally ended as converts.

Of course admissions must be made. Be- ing a pioneer, Scott sometimes seems to us unsophisticated. As a writer he was work- manlike, not an artist with words: as Carlyle said, he seldom wrote a memorable phrase. He could not create heroes and heroines: his main characters seem often of wood or plaster, and they speak in a remote, abstract language. His unforgettable charac-

ters are subordinate in his plots: Scotch dominies, peasants, shopkeepers, old re-

tainers, old lairds, old ladies - the kind of people he knew and appreciated in that antique Scotland which he discovered and

legitimised. That Scotland was limited in time as in place. For all his genuine erudi- tion, Scott could not reach back beyond about 1660. The Civil Wars mark a great breach in his historical consciousness. Before them, his touch is unsure; but aft them memory and understanding are continuous. rhe Fortunes of Nigel is a 'tushery' novel, like Kennilworth; Old Mortality a living masterpiece.

Scott's influence on later novelists was, I suppose, entirely bad. His imitators (as he himself well knew) copied all his faults and have dragged his name down. His influence on the study of history was more complex. At his worst, he inspired the 'period' historians of Victorian times, with their unhistorical romanticism and their bogus local or temporal 'colour'. But at his best, he created a new historical philosophy. After the olympian condescension of the 'philoso- phic historians' of the eighteenth century, he showed, towards the past, a new humility, a new sympathy. And yet his sympathy did not deceive his reason. Like Goethe, whom he so admired, he was both Augustan and romantic. He saw the past both from within and from without. In his childhood in the Borders, in his later forays into the High- lands - two archaic, closed societies, both in dissolution - he discovered the sympathies which made his writing original; but at the same time he never lost his footing in that compact, rational, 'improving' world of en- lightened Edinburgh to which, by birth and education, he belonged.

Scott's greatest historical work is, I believe, Old Mortality. There for the first time (as Lockhart observed) he reached back beyond living memory and reconstructed, from writ- ten sources alone, a forgotten period. No great historian had prepared the way for him. He had to rely on the trash of Wodrow, the spiteful polemics of partisan chroniclers, corrected only by his own historical judg- ment and psychological insight. And yet no historian has even given a juster portrait of the 'Cameronians' and the 'Killing Times'. Scott was criticised fiercely, at the time, by the learned Free Church minister Thomas McCrie, the biographer of Knox and Mel- ville. He was challenged later by Macaulay. But ultimately it is the novelist, not the historians, whom later historians have vindicated.

Mr A. 0. J. Cockshut, in his recent book The Achievement of Walter Scott (Collins 25s) - a book of great insight and subtlety has some excellent observations both on Old Mortality in particular and on Scott's historical philosophy in general. Scott, as he writes, 'was the first to break through the wall of incomprehension erected by Hume': he recovered 'the human content of formu- lae supposed to be dead'. Of course, in so do- ing. Scott was responding to the times: -he lived in the reaction against Napoleonic ag- gression, when French 'reason' had turned into French imperialism, and it was out of that reaction, as Ranke wrote, that the new nineteenth century historical philosophy was born. Ranke himself started as a disciple of Scott - till be rebelled against the un- historical romanticism of Quentin Durward. But at a deeper level he remained a disciple still. 'For Scott', says Mr Cockshut, 'each stage of civilisation is valid in itself, but relative as compared with others'. What is

this but another version of Ranke's famous phrase, that every age is 'immediate to God'?

Ironically (since his Scottish novels are the best), it is in Scotland that Scott's

historical influence has been most disastrous. His compatriots still live on his name. They have built a tourist industry upon it. But they seem incapable, in their present paro- chialism, of seeing his greatness. To them he is always the tutelary, not the universal genius: the champion of that pre-Union, un- assimilated, unenlightened Scotland which resisted English conquest and modern cos- mopolitanism, and resists it still. But this is a travesty of his character. Scott's great- ness sprang from his duality, his capacity to appreciate the autonomy of different societies and different ages and yet to recon- cile this appreciation with an acceptance of the eighteenth century achievement: the Union, the Enlightenment, the end of sterile, internecine Scotch politics, the concentra- tion on social improvement within the new context of Great Britain. Thereby he gave his country a new unity, a new identity, a new pride. All this has been brilliantly shown by Janet Adam Smith in her Walter Scott Lectures on 'Scott and the Idea of Scotland' (University of Edinburgh, 1963). To deny the 'Augustan' basis of his roman- ticism is to deny the complexity of his character and his achievement. It is to drag him down into the kailyard in which so many Scotch patriots and their departments of Scotch history still utter their atavistic grunts.

Of course Scott himself sometimes slipped: his imagination and his emotions, which were both strong, could carry him away. The famous episode of the Prince Regent's visit to Edinburgh in 1822 was one such lapse. Intoxicated by his success in creating, for Hanoverian Scotland, a mythical native pedigree, he temporarily persuaded himself, the Regent and the Low- land gentry that they were all romantic Jacobite Highlanders. In his neo-gothic gas- lit mansion on the Tweed he equipped him- self with a piper and other Highland bric- a-brac, wrapped himself in tartan, and drank whisky from a quaich. Even his loyal son-in-law and biographer found some of this too much. But ultimately Scott always recovered his balance. To the end, his romanticism was corrected by Augustan rationality and sense.

One of his last works was his Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft, which have recently been reprinted (SR Publishers 42s) - unfortunately with pretentious Notes by Mr Raymond Lamont Brown, 'the author and broadcaster', every one of which is either pointless or grossly wrong. These Letters are not an important work. They were 'a task', as Scott wrote, `to which my poverty and not my will consents. But they are very read- able and show the enormous erudition which he carried so lightly, even to the end. They also show his fundamental rationalism. Fas- cinated though he was by stories of witches, possession and Highland second-sight, he never yielded his mind to such 'gothic' fantasies.

Every apparition, every miracle is to him a mere delusion of the mind which reason can always explain away. He laughed at the folly of Highland lairds who, `so late in the day', believed that there were mon- sters in their lochs. Mr Cocksbut quotes, from Lockhart, a story of Scott sharing a room in a country inn, since there was no

other, with a corpse. The people of the inn were amazed, shocked; but 'I laid me down', Scott said afterwards, 'and never had a better night's sleep in my life'. It takes the broadcaster, Mr Lamont Brown, to assert (on the basis of one grotesque misrepre- sentation) that Sir Walter Scott was a superstitious man'.

In general, Scott's later novels are poor stuff. After 1820, as Mr Cockshut says, he was tired and he was writing much too fast. But one work of those declining years is, to

me, fascinating. It is the Journal which he

began, casually enough, in 1825 and con- tinued almost to his death in 1832. Nowhere

else did Scott reveal himself so clearly, for only in his diary, only to himself, would he admit his authorship of the Waverley novels and the disastrous consequences of his own make-believe way of life: of his craving for rural grandeur, his love of feudal hier- archy and dependence, the sheer extrava- gance of his business affairs. When Lock- hart saw that diary, he shrank from publish- ing it. Even today it is not published in full. We do not read the passage in which Scott, when his last novel proved a failure, con- templated, for a moment, a Roman end. But the passages in which, in this accidental work, under the impact of financial nemesis, he at last looked directly on himself, have the dramatic quality of the great novels. Here he speaks out and reveals how much of his apparent affectation was genuine: his real indifference to literary fame, his pro- found love of the country and of solitude, his consuming passion for land (land was my temptation') and, above all, woods and trees.

How he loved his trees! Barbarus has segetes? . . . this was his cri de coeur when the creditors threatened to move in: 'I will write my finger-ends off first'. Even in his carefree days, his novels were seen by him, first of all, as 'the means of planting such groves and purchasing such wastes'. Now they were the means of preserving what he had planted. As for his writing, how lightly he took it all! Those books which had en- chanted Europe, which had made a revolu- tion in literature and history, were all an enjoyable exercise: 'I love to hear the press thumping, clattering and banging in my rear'. As an artist, he looked -objectively at his faults and congratulated himself at least on being better than his imitators. Mean- while 'the young woods are rising in a kind of profusion I *never saw elsewhere. Let me once clear off these encumbrances, and they shall wave broader and deeper yet. But to attain this I must work'. So he worked, 'hab, nab, at a venture.' Pages vanish from under my pen and find their way to J. Ballantyne, who is grinding away with his presses'. If Scott had died in 1825, his fame as a novelist would not have suf- fered. But without his Journal how much less we would have seen into the reserved and complex personality of that 'Great Un- known' who hid himself behind the genial face of the sheriff of Selkirkshire, the 'Duke of Darnick'!