THE WAVERLEY NOVELS

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 58, Issue 4191, 31 May 1939, Page 5

THE WAVERLEY NOVELS

WHEN SCOTT GAVE UP POETRY. It was in 1814—125 years ago—that Sir Walter Scott took up and completed an old manuscript which he had begun nine years before. Thus “Waverley,” his first novel, was writ ten, and the long series of immortal works of fiction called the “Waverley Novels” commenced. At this time Lord Byron in his poems began to lift up his voice of cynicism, and his wild cry of bitterness was drawing men’s thoughts away from the old chivalrous lays of Scott. Men now felt that the trUe romance and chivalry of life was at their doors and that it was in the present the real knight must ride to the redress of wrong. It is characteristic of Scott that he knew perfectly well that, when Byron began to write, his day as a poet was over. He quietly said “Byron had ‘bet ham’ ” and he never sang again. Instead of waging a losing battle for his lost supremacy, he praised his rival and left the arena with all the honours of war. Scott left the field of poetry with dignity, but it was only to open a new chapter in his great career. Lockhart has given a vivid account of how Scott wrote his first novel “Waverley.” It seems it was written at white heat and with scarcely a pause. THE SHADOW OF A HAND. Lockhart was assisting at a party in a house which exactly faced the room where Scott was writing. One of the company suddenly rose from his chair and said he could “endure it no longer.” What he had been enduring was the shadow of a hand, moving hour after hour with rhythmic regularity, behind the opposite window, and piling as it wrote sheet after sheet of manuscript. “I have been watching it,” he said. “It fascinates the eye, it never stops, page after page is thrown on that heap of manuscript and still it goes on unwearied, and so it will be till the candles are brought in, and God knows how long after that. It is the same every night.” Lockhart suggested that it was probably some stupid engrossing clerk. “No!” said the host, “I well know what hand it is. It is Walter Scott’s.” The characteristics of the “Waverley Novels” are well known wherever the English language is spoken. Scott has made history live, and generally speaking his historic portraits are correct. ' At all events they live and bear the impress of reality. He accompanied his greatest, triumphs in literature by the use of the simplest means, and it is this simplicity of the “Waverley Novels” which makes them so unique.—James Baird, F.S.A. Scot., in the Weekly Scotsman.