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glad to know that every newspaper in Scotland and many in England had signs of mourning usual on the ' death of a king.' His royal soul passed on its way from a sorrowing nation. If there can be an epic in the intimate prose of one man's private letters and journal, the Journal and Letters of Sir Walter Scott are an epic of the British home.

I have touched on the redoubled delight which the novels can give to any man who has read them as a boy. I have dwelt on the part which Scott himself played as a man. He was a great man. But was

he a great artist ?

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That is my third point of view. If we are to consider him fairly from that point of view, we must strip from his works the glamour reflected on them, both from our own early associations, and from our present knowledge of the personality which he was at such pains to dissemble.

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What did he accomplish as an artist? What effects of his art endure ? We must face these ' questions in an artistic age, when so few achieve anything memorable, and so many assert that the mighty dead lacked finish. Scott 'gives himself away to the apostles of precious sterility. Let us make that admission. But let us also make the corresponding claim. He gives himself away in harvests. He was not, all allow, 'a barren rascal,' and we need not review the amount of his work. But neither, all must concede, was he a punctilious creator. 'His literary life' resembled, he tells us, 'the natural life of a savage; absolute indolence interchanged with hard work.' And we know, again from him, that he cheerfully ended the second volume of a novel without the slightest idea how the story was to be wound up to a catastrophe.' In

what sense, then, was he a great artist, or as we hold in this Club, one of the greatest? Scott could turn a phrase with precision when he pleased; none better. But let us go deeper.

A great artist, interpreting mankind to men, and reconciling man to his lot, does one of two things; and the greatest do both. He either bequeathes a vast completed monument to posterity, or else he invents a new method as a guide to future endeavour. Scott's claim under the first head is not in dispute. Let us establish his claim under the second head; his claim to have invented a method that was both new and dynamic.

To do that I will put a competent and impartial witness into the box. I am too ignorant to be competent, too enamoured to be impartial.

I put Nassau Senior into the box. I have by me his reviews of the novels conveniently collected from the Quarterly, and bound in one volume. To read them is to look back at the immediate impression made by the novels on a critic, competent, impartial, even I may say hostile. Senior, educated at Eton, and distinguished at Oxford, belongs, in terms of the conflict between Classics and Romantics,' distinctly to the Classical tradition, and is apt enough to behave' in that concatenation accordingly.' He writes in 1821, seven years after Waverley was published, still in ignorance of its authorship so complete, that he notes an heraldic error committed by the 'unknown' in Ivanhoe, and, turning to Marmion, wonders at the coincidence of a similar mistake in his great rival, Sir Walter Scott.' And this is what he says or rather what 'we' say, for he never relaxes the august plural of Gifford's critical engine:'We shall never forget the disappointment and list

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lessness with which in the middle of a watering-place long vacation WE tumbled a new, untalked-of, anonymous novel out of the box which came to Us from Our faithless librarian, filled with substitutes for everything WE had ordered. . . . We opened it, at hazard, in the second volume, and instantly found Ourselves, with as much surprise as Waverley in the centre of the Chevalier's court. Little did We suspect while we wondered who this literary giant might be, that seven years after, WE should be reviewing so many more of his volumes.' Senior looks back once again, in 1824, to the wonderful day on which he first read Waverley in the seaside lodginghouse, 'little aware that the work which was delighting us was to form an epoch in the literary history of the world.' My hostile Classical witness gives abundant testimony to the novelty and force of Scott's art.

Its immediate effect was no less evident to all noncritical contemporaries. A Hungarian tradesman pointed out the bust of 'le sieur Valtere Skote the portrait of 'l'homme le plus célèbre en l'Europe.' Dr. Walsh, travelling from Constantinople to England, found the fame of Scott's works at every stage from the frontier of Christendom. But let us consider the moment at which Scott produced this effect.

It was in 1814, the year of the Congress of Vienna, that Scott, rummaging in the drawers of an old cabinet,' found the mislaid MS. of Waverley, and 'took the fancy of finishing it.' He did finish the last two volumes in the course of three summer weeks, and writes, 'I had a great deal of fun in the accomplishment of this task, though I do not expect that it will be popular in the South, as much of the

humour, if there be any, is local, and some of it even professional.' Yet it is odds to-day that the name of Waverley is familiar to as many as the names of Castlereagh or Metternich.

Scott produced this effect at the climax of a series of political convulsions which had wracked the diplomacy and shattered the armies of Europe. Blood enough had been spilled. And now ink was to be spilled. For that one book did more than any other to precipitate the controversy between Classics and Romantics. And Scott did more than any other writer to give impulse and area to the Romantic School.

By what method, we may ask, did he make the Chevalier interesting in 1814 not only to Senior, my Classical witness, but to nations who knew nothing of Scottish manners, and cared little enough, I dare say, for an abortive effort to retrieve one lost crown, prosecuted in an age almost forgotten by men who had seen the crowns of all Europe redistributed, by the Revolution, by Napoleon, and the Congress?

Let us look at his method. Waverley, Guy Mannering, Redgauntlet are written, as Scott himself tells us, round the professional knowledge of a lawyer with a predilection for lawlessness. Their origins are of the driest. Never did such irritating grains of sand excite the production of such pearls. These cannot be accidents of Scott's temperament and vocation. We cannot explain him as a literary oyster. Indeed, the image is inadequate. They are not pearls, but, rather, gems bespeaking design. Senior tries to explain the method of their execution. He addresses himself to a new harmony in literature, and seeks to account for its charm. He notes that the author

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of Waverley painted two classes: beggars and gipsies, sovereigns and their favourites, the very lowest and the very highest ranks of society,' better 'than that rank to which he must himself belong.' And asks how the author came to copy more correctly what he knew imperfectly, than what he knew well ? After canvassing the question, backwards and forwards, he concludes that portraits partly imagined may be more true than portraits wholly observed; and so affirms that Scott, by employing both imagination and observation in conjunction, had indeed discovered a new method which saved him from two dangers the danger of losing general resemblance in too close a copy of individuals with whom he was intimate,' and the further danger of introducing effort over-colouring and caricature . . . in his endeavour to render striking representations of the well known.' Now those are the errors of Realism. Senior saw that it was a mistake, by focussing the obvious, to belie general experience widely imagined; and a greater mistake to make the obvious grotesque in order to redeem it from dulness.

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Scott avoided these two errors to which realism is prone. But he did far more, which was not apparent to a Classic making reluctant concessions to a Romantic. Senior gets at half the truth of Scott's new departure, but only at half.

In order to get at the whole truth; in order to understand the magnitude of Scott's innovation, we must consider the condition of literature at the moment when he rummaged in the drawers of that old cabinet.

Scott's complete achievement is still obscured to us by the conflict between Classics and Romantics.

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