Recent Criticisms of Scott.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XXXIX, Issue 8, 24 August 1907, Page 31

Recent Criticisms of Scott.

Of all our novelists who arc fairly entitled to be called classical, Scott and Dickens probably keep the surest hold on public favour. There is more talk about them thun ever; clubs are formed in their honour, banquets are held, and eloges are delivered. The chatter and the afterdinner oratory may not always be wise or well-informed, but tjicy are symptomatic. When there is so much smoke there is certain to be a fire somewhere. Another symptom is the constant publication of books about the authors, which shows that people must exist, or be sup posed by publishers to exist, who want to read about Scott and Dickens, whether they want to read their books or not. Unhappily, this indication does not necessarily point to a pure and bright flame of enthusiasm. In Scott's ease, there is one book, published nearly seventy years ago, which contains practically everything about Scott that is worth knowing. It is a long book, a book that runs into many volumes. But it was written by a master of English style, by a man of fine instincts and exquisite taste, by the one person fitted by temperament and circumstance to be Scott’s biographer. Hence it is one of the most delightful prose works in its own department which English literature contains. Yet the minor works about Scott which now issue from the press find a justification for their existence in the assumed facts that this is not an age of “ leisure,” and that the world has no time to read Lockhart.

Such is the excuse frankly proffered by Mr. G. Le G. Norgate for his “Life of Sir Walter Scott” (London, 1906), and, with some misgivings, by Mr. Andrew Lang for his “Sir Walter Scott” (Literary Lives Series; London, 1906). We confess to sharing what is obviously Mr. Lang’s feeling, that people who really take an interest in Scott will somehow or other find time to read his Life, and that it is difficult to believe that anyone seriously cares for Scott who has not contrived to do so. But that is not to affirm that these two volumes are superfluous, or to deny that they are heartily welcome in their own way. They disarm criticism at the very outset by the amplitude of their acknowledgments to the great biographer, and, as regards Scott himself,, they are thoroughly sound; They do not blame him for being what he was not. ’ They neither reproach him with having been born too late, nor commiserate him on having been born too early. In short, they take Seott as they find him and as he was; and Seott as he was, like Dr. Johnson as he was, is good enough for most men. If we are to draw a distinction, we must own that Mr. Lang has the lighter touch and his work the more delicate literary flavour. Moreover, he has the advantage—a decided one in dealing with Sir Walter — : of being a “ brither Scot,” ferby being a Borderer. One or two curious little errors may be noted in both books: what work is free from them Mr. Lang attributes to Scott the false quantity in Maida’s epitaph, which Scott, no doubt, insisted upon fathering, but which the Life shows was unquestionably Lockhart’s. The inference he draws as to the extent of Scott’s classical learning can scarcely, therefore, hold good; though in point of accurate seho larship it would require a blind .partisan to champion the Wizard, or, indeed, any

contemporary of his who happened to have been brw.l at a Scots grammar school. Longs and shorts have never been our strong point north of the Tweed, as may still be seen from the annual reports of the inspectors who examine our secondary schools. But Scott’s knowledge of the classics and the extent of his reading in the ancient tongues were in fact much greater than is often supposed, and would appear really considerable were it not foi the immense range of his attainments <n more congenial branches of learning. The high importance of Latin and Greek r.i any scheme of education which professes to deal with subjects other than the me chanical arts it never occurred to him to question. Mr. Norgate is no less accurate in bis facts, though he places Abbotsford higher up the Tweed than Ashesticl, instead of lower down. We cannot imagine, however, what put it into his head that Fairport is a thin disguise for Porto hello, and that the scene of the “ Anti quary ” is laid among the fishing villages of the southern coast of the Firth of Forth. The name, no doubt, may be a translation, and Musselburgh may have suggested Musselcrag; but there are no cliffs worthy of the name between Leith and the Rhodes’ Farm, and the novel itself makes it perfectly clear that, wherever its scene was laid, it was beyond the Forth. Tradition, too, is decided and unchallenged for Arbroath and Auchmithie. Criticism is a matter of opinion, not of fact. It is sufficient, therefore, to express surprise that Mr. Lang should find the opening chapters of “ Waverley” “ prolix and unnecessary,” and the hope that when Mr. Norgate describes “ Roke by ” as the “ most, brilliant of Scott’s failures” he uses the word “failure” in the Brummelian sense. For there are those to whom these chapters seem among the most delightful of Scott’s prose writings—the “cackle” being no less worthy of attention than the “horses” —while the poem seems second to “ Mannion ” alone in the hierarchy of his longer poetical works. We had imagined that Scott’s fame was by this time established on a tolerably secure basis, and that there was a reasonably complete agreement among critics of all schools of thbnght as to his greatness. ' But. is seems we' were mistaken, for the literary critic of a leading London daily paper recently struck with no uncertain -finger a note which we had not heard for long, and which we little thought to hear again. To this review er’s eagle eye it seems that Sir Walter is “ an author whose name is more and more dropping out of public consideration,” though it is admitted that he retains “ a compact and devoted body of worshippers who have never bent the knee to modern Baals.” “We” —by which apparently is meant the readers of this generation — “ we do not care for prolix introductions . . We desire a more intimate and searching psychology, with all that that, science includes.” As if there were not enough of such psychology as an honest man may meddle with in Rose Bradwardine and Nanty Ewart to furnish forth a whole regiment of the novelists who up pear to “us”? The critic then proceeds to an astonishing assertion of the superiority of the Byron of the “Giaour” and “Lara” to the Scott of “ Marmion.” Byron, forsooth! “explores all the recesses of the liuman heart in a fAshion of

■which Scott was incapable.” Scott was incapable (let us be thankful for it), and with characteristic generosity credited Byron with “ deep seated knowledge of the human heart.” But we are not bound to follow Scott in all his critical pronouncements, and pretend to hold at this time of day that the Byronie hero —that stagiest of all stagey puppets—is a miracle of psychological analysis. It further appears, on the authority of the same critic, that Scott was devoid of " what we eall literary conscientiousness." “ He *vas not an artist in the proper sense of the term.’’ “His style was of the easy, go as-you-please description.” “ Both his poetry and his romances suffer from the same fault—the entire absence of critical revision.” Seott has been “ superannuated ” by the “ lack of artistry' in him.” “ Some of us who care for form i-.re irritated by Walter Scott.'” Some of us who care for literature are irritated by Scott's censor. Scott “ lives no more for the present generation,” because he is defective in “ style,” if it is by virtue of style that authors lives. The cat is now out of the bag, and a sufficient ly mouldy and venerable animal she proves to be. What is all this but tile dreary old cant about Sir Walter’s " style” for which, most unfortunately, Mr. Stevenson gave the cue to a number of writers conspicuously inferior to himself ? Scott did not trouble to play the assiduous and meticulous ape to anyone. But his style in point of vocabulary and diction will bear comparison with that of the most industrious Higglers who ever subjected their mosaic to “ critical revision,” and. whatever its demerits, it achieves its object and produces the effect aimed at, which is the great and essential thing about the means to any end. That his rhetoric, when occasion demands, is superb not even the dull ear of a London critic can probably fail to recognise. As for the talk about psychology, Mr. Carlyle played the part of devil's advocate on that point many years ago, and no modern successor is likely to improve upon his effort in special pleading. Perhaps the Sage’s stern view might have been modified but for the mysterious miscarriage or neglect of a letter addressed by’ him to Sir Walter on the strength of his intercourse with Goethe. In any event,, there are no signs that posterity has ratified his familiar strictures about fashioning characters from the skin inwards. The tendency of pre-sent-day criticism is all, we think, in the other direction; and the isolated instance from the metropolitan press to which we have directed attention merely serves to emphasise what less antiquated persons than the critic of the “ Daily Telegraph ” would never have dreamt of disputing. His remarks may be dismissed (with a caution) to the later Victorian section of the musueum for antediluvian curiosities.—By J. H. Millar in “ Chamber’s Magazine.”