Sir Walter Scott as Literary Critic

8/13/2019 Sir Walter Scott as Literary Critic

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Sir Walter Scott as Literary Critic

By Nicholas Birns

Scott was a convulsive force in the literature not only of Scotland and Britain but

also of all Europe in the early nineteenth century. His poetry personified the

evocation of bardic strivings urged by Hugh Blair. His later historical novels, at first

published pseudonymously, came to incarnate the socially meaningful fiction of the

past for Marxist critics such as Georg Lukcs. That this Scottish balladeers and

chronicler of adventure could bridge the gap between an eighteenth-century

rhetorician and a twentieth-century advocate of social reform demonstrates the

titanic breadth of Scotts vision, and his achievement as entertainer, chronicler,

anthropologist, and sage.

Scott wrote much that could be said to be in the critical genre including prefaces to

his novel as well as treatises on balladic and oral poetry. Finding practical

corroboration for Vicos association of poetry with the early stage of cultural

development, Scott enlarged Vicos sense of this association by imagining poetry as

not just a form of aristocracy but of the folk. This was a vernacular that was popular

in the widest sense of the word, and not just a Dantean volgare illustre always

tethered to a notion of literary merit connected with classicism. Scott, though dud

not idealize populate language, differing somewhat from Wordsworths implication

in the 1800 Preface to Lyrical Balladsthat writing words close to those used by the

people brought poetry greater truth. Scott cites several examples where stately

stories of the noble and dignified were trivialized by folk balladeers that changed


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names, simplified morals, and took out stylistic nuance, and definitely saw these as

changes for the worse. On the other hand, though, Scott also mocked the attempt to

dress up ballads by adapting them to heroic couplets and to eighteenth-century idea

of politeness. His respect for Bishop Percy and his insistence that the Bishop had

been the first qualified to do serious scholarship (echoed even in the twenty-first

century by Simon Durings contention that Percy was a precursor of Goethes idea of

Weltliteratur) not only calls attention to the worth of compiling popular poetry but

demonstrates that it is hard, scholarly work, as arduous and rewarding in its own

way as commenting on Aristotle. It is not just a matter, as some other Romantics less

actually acquaintedwith common people than Scott was might suppose, of opening

oneself up to the reservoir of the popular will and letting its energy surge into the

literary. There must be diligent collecting, comparing, authenticating, inevitably the

work of an educated person, however popular their instinct.

Scott only became famous as a poet in his thirties and as a novelist in his forties.

It was not known for some years (formally, until 1827) that Scott was indubitably

the author of the Waverley novels. Scott was not only among the firstpreceded to

a degree by the Anglo-Irish Maria Edgeworth (1767-1849) and the Scotswoman,

Jane Porter (1776-1850) to write the historical novel--but he was the first to

theorize it. His aphorism Tis fifty years hencethe subtitle of Waverley--

demarcated the historical novel as being about a time of which living memory was

at the very least diminishing. His prefaces, and the lengthy prose excurses in the

actual novels, gave a sense of how the novelist approached history. There was a

critical aspect to this historical approach, as the author took apart his own processes


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of research and his own field of intention, laying it out before the reader in

reasonably plain view. First famous as a novelist of Scotland--where his

combination of moral sympathy with Scottish nationalism, political inclination

towards the union that had resulted in Great BritainScott eventually proved

popular both in British society and among nations striving for their own form of

expression throughout the Western world. Notably, Scott set one of his most famous

novels, Ivanhoe(1819), entirely in England. This (eventually) crowd-pleasing novel

featured a very affirmative portrait of Rebecca, a Jewish woman, and may be seen as

the British equivalent of Lessings Nathan the Wise, in reversing anti-Semitic

stereotypes. He also wrote Quentin Durward(1823, set in late medieval France) and

Anne of Geierstein(1829, set in late medieval Switzerland). In other words, Scotts

technique was transposable. He wrote about specific histories but manyspecific

histories. Like Herder, his theories of national culture allowed for an awareness of

disparate national cultures, not simply incorporated into a general world culture as

the Enlightenment might have wanted to do, but neither existing simply in sealed-

off redoubt of self-sustaining cultural nationalism. That critics as distinct as Goethe

and Coleridge mused on Scott in their later years testifies to his works wide

penetration and to how much it mattered.

After a financial crisis in the late 1820s, Scott was forced to feverishly write in

order to make money, causing severe damage to his personal health. Scott wrote

long nonfiction books under much pressure from publishers relying almost totally

on memory. This distracted him from the systematic fictional and critical project

that his work had been accreting into, but in his journals he still managed to make


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cogent observations not just about his life and work but the literary scene. Scott

was the first prominent person in the literary world to take notice of Jane Austen,

saying, in a journal entry for March 14, 1826, The big bow-wow strain I can do

myself like any now going, but the exquisite touch which renders ordinary

commonplace things and characters interesting from the truth of the description

and the sentiment is denied to me. This graciousness is unusual in any novelist. But

Scott was, by all accounts, one of the most genial and humble people ever to become

prominent in the literary world. In a sense, there was no one better suited by

temperament to bear the worldwide fame that became his. His lack of personal

braggadocio helped make romantic ideas in criticism much more sanctioned by the

general public; in this way he became a peer of such figures like Hazlitt and Leigh

Hunt, who both admired him despite Scott being well to the right of them politically.

Scotts interest in the medieval was one of the principal nodes of Romanticisms

increased interest in that period. His immediate legacy was to his son-in-law and

biographer, John Gibson Lockhart (1794-1854), who acted as his eulogist and

apostolic successor but induced a conformist and homey view of Scotts work. Scott

gradually faded into only historical relevancepart of the way Virginia Woolf

indicated the fustiness of the Mr. Ramsay character in To The Lighthousewas his

enjoyment of Scotts The Antiquary (1816).But succeeding erasignited by

Lukcss championship of the historical novel and furthered by new historicist

criticism--have once again given Scotts fount of reflection a sense of pertinence.


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Bibliography

Duncan, Ian, Scotts Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh, Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 2008.

Felluga, Dino Franco,The Perversity of Poetry: Romantic Ideology and the Popular

Male Poet of Genius.Albany: SUNY Press, 2005.

Maxwell, Richard, The Historical Novel in Europe, 1650-1950. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2009.

Rigney, Ann. The Afterlives of Sir Walter Scott. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Wilt, Judith, Secret Leaves: The Novels of Sir Walter Scott. Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1985.
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Sir Walter Scott as Literary Critic