SIR WALTER SCOTT

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIX, Issue 21296, 24 September 1932, Page 1 (Supplement)

SIR WALTER SCOTT

IIY KOTATtE

IN THE CRITICS' DEN

Tile Scott Centenary brings the inevitable question: llow does Scott's reputation stand after one hundred years? I suppose there never has been a man so obviously among the classics that has been subjected to so much hostile criticism and on so many different grounds. Patriotic raptures aro poor soil for cairn and reasoned judgment; a man so justly praised for many other things usually suffers from overpraise of his work on the one hand and underpraiso on the other from those alienated by the general chorus of commendation. And besides, Scott is so immense a figure, however you regard him, that lie presents an easy mark for even the most ill-equipped bowman. Mr. J. B. Priestley, who is as eminent in criticism as in fiction, summarises the general lines of attack and the motives prompting them. There is the man who swears by the well-constructed tale. Scott to him is untidy and careless; he leaves loose ends lying about. Ho rambles on without sufficient plan. Then the presumptuous fellow that thinks he knows all about women declares that Scott cannot handle a love situation, and that his women are cold and stiff and formal. Carlyle could find 110 profound philosophy in all his work. He has no message. That is practically what Bernard Shaw says about Shakespeare and the Elizabethans ■ —they had nothing to say, though they could say it magnificently. The purists consider he has no style. He pours out his treasure without regard to form. His prose is cumbrous, shapeless, without pith or bite. He ha's often falsified history, and the exact historian can pick a hundred flaws in his facts and representations of character. And last in Priestley's list is the schoolboy's frank opinion that he is dull. The Case Against Now a case can he made out for every one of these grounds of condemnation. Scott was more a story-teller than a weaver of plots. The plot is the symmetry of the story, the neat concatenation of all its parts as you stand outside it and beyond its emotional sweep, and try to map out the course the action has followed) ' Not- every great author is & completemaster of plot construction. Shakespeare is as much open to criticism a s Scott. So is Thackeray for that matter. And there is many a fifth-rate man that can weave a plot of the most perfect symmetry and cohesion and logical development.' But the story, rush of the narrative when you are under the master's spell, tlie action as the author lives it from page to page and as he makes you live it as you .read, that is the matter that counts for most. In this field Scott easily holds his own with the supreme masters. Scott, says Elton, is a great story-teller and not a great plotter. I do not know that his greatest admirers have ever made any other claim for him.

I have never heard anyone with a right to be heard affirm that Scott was at his best in the boudoir. The lovey-dovey business was wholly alien to his robust, virile temperament. He was a man of action, a man of the open air. His love interest is always of the conventional type. You feel he is glad to get it over and done with. A woman of action he can paint vigorously and powerfully. That he can paint a genuinely attractive woman of the type he admires you can see easily enough in Diana Vernon. Was if, not," the distinguished Professor Saintsbury who said there were only three women in literature that he would not mind being married to, and Diana Vernon was one of them ? Jeanie Deans is one of literature's great women, drawn with perfect sympathy and understanding. You can't have everything, and it is gross ingratitude to the bestower of treasure on so lavish a scale to condemn him out of hand for his limitations in one minor respect. Propaganda

_ And is it so certain that Scott had no message," as the cant of to-day has it? lie was not a propagandist of that virulent type with which we are, alas, too familiar. Ho was not using his art to ram his own peculiar ideas down everybody's throat. He was no apostle of uplift. He was not for ever mounting the pulpit in his enthusiasm for improving other people. The only one he was always trying to improve was himself. He always thought the best of other people. He believed that human nature was the same in all ages of history, and that when you summed up the good and bad in the world there were more decent people and kindly people and honourable people than there were the other sort. That is the background of all his writing. And not often have Inagnificent powers been dedicated to a nobler service. The cynic may jeer and the clever up-to-date young modern may shrug his narrow shoulders; but while there are men and women who face life with the faith that, in spito of everything, it is good, and that, in spite of appearances, there is more good in human nature than evil, Scott will fill an honoured place not only among the great, but among the good of tlie earth

Style Of his style much can be said for and against.' Often it is clumsy and ill-con-structed. He wrote at a tremendous rate and ho had no subtle appreciation of word-music when lie was moving at top speed. But he could spin a phrase with the best of them when he was not galloping joyfully over the country. Ilis songs are marked by a delicacy and grace that had been lost to purely English literature for centuries, except perhaps in some of the lyrics of Blake. His poetry is marked by endless verbal felicities and his ear for music never failed him there. But he was moving too fast for ultra-refinement in the vast body of prose lie composed for publication. And when all is said, his style is always adequate. Ho can sketch in a landscape till it takes life before our eyes; in his best work the setting is no painted backcloth—it is alive as much as the figures he puts in motion against it. He can describe a vivid scene of action or unfold unerringly a character in words that fit the purpose he has in view as its skin fits a snake. A style that can do *ko much need not ho condemned out of hand because it cannot do everything. He was a man of encyclopedic knowledge. but he was not infallible. He had not the benefit of the results of the close research into the past that has marked historical studies during the last hundred years. But. again his knowledge was nearly always adequate, and lie had matchless powers in reconstructing the ahcient scene and in making its characters intelligible human beings. Ilis Richard I. in " Ivanhoe " and the " Talisman " may bo nothing like the actual man, but I cannot see the Scott version being superseded by the modern historians. Possibly the soundest criticism of all is the schoolboy's. The modern mind does often find Scott dull. It, takes him some time to wind himself into his story, and wc are accustomed to snip-snap story telling and action from the jump. But the criticism holds equally of all literature of a hundred years ago in its impact on the modern mind. Why condemn Scott for what he is.not, when he is so much of the highest value and beauty? It was Swift, I think, who reproved Homer because he shows in the Odyssey and the Iliad no sign of acquaintance with the polity and doctrine of the Church of England as by law established. Much of the criticism of Scott is on the same intellectual level. 'ln portraiture, in dialogue, in action and in situation his novels stand among the supreme things in our literature. And 110 man of our blood has been more honoured and exerted a wider influence among the nations of Europe.