Contributors to the April Review MR. GAMALIEL BRADFORD is well known to our readers as biographer, critic and poet. He lives at Wellesley Hills, Massachusetts. DR. HENRY HOLLAND CARTER is Professor of English in Miami University, Oxford, Ohio. He has recently edited Ben Jonson's Every Man in His Humour. DR. CHARLES L. WELLS is Professor of Ecclesiastical History in the University of the South. MRS. MARGARETTA B. BYRDE is an Englishwoman whose critical and poetic work wins many readers. DR. WALTER WOODBURN HYDE is Assistant Professor of Greek and Ancient History in the University of Pennsylvania. He contributed The Charm of Greek Travel to the REVIEW for October, 1921. DR. SEDLEY LYNCH WARE, Professor of History in the University of the South, contributes the second of three papers on France and the Great War. MR. JOHN JAY CHAPMAN has published a number of plays, poems and essays. MR. JESSE F. MACK is Assistant Professor of English in Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio. DR. NEWMAN I. WHITE is Professor of English in Trinity College, Durham, North Carolina. REV. LAWRENCE FAUCETT, lately Assistant Professor of English in the University of the South, is at present studying at St. John's College, Oxford. He will shortly enter upon educational and missionary work in China. MISS MARION COUтHOUY SMITH has published a volume of verse entitled The Final Star. DR. STANLEY T. WILLIAMS is Assistant Professor of English in Yale University. He has written for the REVIEW on Newman and on Matthew Arnold. DR. ROY TEMPLE HOUSE is Head of the Department of Modern Languages in the University of Oklahoma. Helen the fair, Helen the fair, thy face Has charmed my travail on the wayward sea. Bids me make light of simple honesty. She charmed his travail on the wayward sea. As some vast comet, from unfathomed lair, Sweeps, blasting earth with plague of hideous things, So moved that star of mortal majesty; And in its train wrath, havoc, and despair Burst on the splendor of a score of kings. Wellesley Hills, Massachusetts. GAMALIEL BRADFORD. RUSKIN AND THE WAVERLEY NOVELS Andrew Lang, in an essay on Scott, remarks: "Often as it has been my fortune to write about Sir Walter Scott, I never sit down to do so without a sense of happiness and elation." Many have been of similar mind. The circle of Scott's admirers has always been large, and includes names as diverse as those of Goethe,2 Byron, FitzGerald, Dumas, Gladstone," Hogg,' Irving, and Ruskin. Scott wins his popularity in no one way. His poetry has had its admirers. His novels have had a host of readers. But many in his own day, and since then, have been drawn to 1Warner: Library of the World's Best Literature, xxii, 11995. 2 Albert Bielschowsky: The Life of Goethe (tr. W. A. Cooper), iii, 173, 175. E. C. Mayne: Byron, ii, 278 n 2: "Byron's delight in the Waverley Novels was so great that he never travelled without his copies of them, and Quentin Durward was one of the last books he read." A. Benson: Edward FitzGerald, p. 159: “FitzGerald worshipped Scott, read and re-read him in the days of strong sight; and in the days of clouded vision had the novels read to him. Scott opened a door to him into an enchanted world, not the dreary, familiar world he knew so well and was often so wearied of, but into a brave, bright country of fair ladies and shrewd crones, of freebooters and knights and gallant gentlemen. . . . Scott's defects as a writer seemed to FitzGerald to float like straws on a river deep and wide." 5P. FitzGerald: Life and Adventures of Alexander Dumas, i, 98: "The English writer that enjoyed the heartiest popularity, and who was read with delight and interest, was Walter Scott; and though Dumas, like his countrymen, disdained to acknowledge obligation, historical romances like Ivanhoe and Quentin Durward suggested the romantic historical drama which Dumas and Victor Hugo were presently to introduce; nay, the dashing spirit of Monte Cristo and of The Three Musketeers is to be found in the same illustrious models." Cf. John Morley: Life of Gladstone, i, 387 n1; iii, 424, 491. 'James Hogg's intimacy with and admiration for Scott may quickly be verified by reading the references to Hogg in Lockhart's Life of Walter Scott. In 1834 Hogg published The Domestic Manners and Private Life of Sir Walter Scott. See Hogg's Lines to Sir Walter Scott. See Irving's letter in which he comments upon the rumor that Walter Scott was the author of the Sketch Book (P. M. Irving: Life and Letters of Washington Irving, ii, 22): “I cannot help smiling at the idea that anything I have written should be dee:ned worthy of being attributed to Sir Walter Scott, and that I should be called upon to vindicate my weak pen from the honor of such a parentage. He could tenant half a hundred scribblers like myself on the mere skirts of his literary reputation." 9 him chiefly as a generous and high-souled man, so loving by nature that, if report be true, not only dogs were devoted to him as a kind master, but a sentimental pig conceived an ardent attachment for him. Since the name of Scott is a familiar household word, to mention it is probably to awaken the memory of a series of dramatic pictures, seen first, perhaps, in childhood in the pages of the novels that have served so many children as the magic key opening to them the world of romance. It may be a great tournament, Queen Elizabeth's visit to Kenilworth, the mysterious mass in the cave of Theodorick, the meeting between Louis XI and Charles of Burgundy, Mary Queen of Scots' escape from Lochleven Castle, Cromwell's raid at Woodstock, Waverley entertained in the hall of Fergus MacIvor, or the exploits of Rob Roy's band of rovers. In the same way, one is able to mention quite casually a goodly number of people from Scott's novels whom he remembers as real persons and not as names in books. No one forgets Jeanie Deans, Diana Vernon, Flora MacIvor, Edie Ochiltree, Old Mortality, Jonathan Oldbuck, Madge Wildfire, Saunders Mucklebackit, Dominie Samson, Andrew Fairservice, or Peter Peebles. Yet our familiarity with certain portions of Scott's work occasionally leads us to forget his total literary output. His novels and tales alone number thirty-two. These stories, from Count Robert of Paris to St. Ronan's Well, cover a period of about eight centuries and record events in the reigns of fifteen English rulers, besides the period of the Commonwealth. They localize these events in Constantinople, Jerusalem, Wales, Syria, Flanders, France, Switzerland, and various parts of England and Scotland. Scott was forty-three years of age when his first novel was published. Known in the literary world before this time as a poet, he had produced a body of verse fairly large in bulk. One must not forget either his translations from the German, his collections of ballads, his biographies and editions of Dryden and Scott, his life of Napoleon, comprising 'P. M. Irving: Life and Letters of Washington Irving (ed. 1863), i, 381 ff.; 383, 385; J. G. Lockhart: Life of Walter Scott (Macm., 1914), iii, 399 ff. |